“Red Flags In His Closet”: Jindal Repudiates His Communist Past
The shamelessness of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is not a topic I have arbitrarily chosen to emphasize at this blog. It’s just that the man provides so many fresh outrages so often.
It’s old news by now that in the course of this year’s Louisiana legislative session, Jindal has flip-flopped entirely on the Common Core education initiative that he and his state once championed. But rather than quietly checking a box on the subject for his vetting by conservative activists once he formally launches his 2016 presidential campaign, Bobby’s now howling at the moon, per this report from the Times-Pic‘s Julia O’Donoghue:
After weeks of ratcheting up the anti-Common Core rhetoric, Gov. Bobby Jindal issued some of his most blistering remarks on the academic standards yet Wednesday night (May 21).
“We support higher standards and rigor in the classroom, but every day, concern among parents is growing over Common Core. The feds are taking over and rushing this. Let’s face it: centralized planning didn’t work in Russia, it’s not working with our health care system and it won’t work in education. Education is best left to local control,” said Jindal through a written statement.
Russia? Russia?
This is so over the top that even Louisiana Republicans who have long supported Jindal are protesting, like his staunch ally as head of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, Chas Roemer:
Common Core backers say Jindal’s remarks about the academic standards have become more about national politics than local education policy. The governor is expected to launch a 2016 presidential campaign and he has his eye on Iowa caucus goers more than Louisiana citizens, said Chas Roemer, president of state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
“This is presidential politics,” said Roemer, a Common Core supporter, about the governor’s statement. “This is the politics of our governor, who is running for president.”
Jindal was a Common Core backer as recently as a year ago. Louisiana became one of over 40 states to officially adopt Common Core back in 2010. The academic benchmarks were developed through a collaboration of governors and education officials from states across the country, including Jindal.
So if Common Core is indeed part of a commie plot, Jindal has some red flags in his own closet, along with an exorcism.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 23, 2014
“Fox News’ Demented Poster Boy”: Why Angry Rancher Cliven Bundy Is No Patriot
The latest right-wing media poster-victim, Cliven Bundy, is just the latest in a long line of desert dwellers who thinks he or she should not have to follow the law and has a god-given right to unlimited use of public resources, in this case, rangeland. I know the mentality well, because I grew up in rural Nevada and clung desperately to such beliefs until only a few years ago.
Bundy has not paid grazing fees in close to 20 years, while the federal government has, with painful, stupid moves, tried to somehow deal with him. Bundy also faced restrictions because he continued to graze cattle on a slice of public land reserved for the endangered desert tortoise. He was invited to talk to Sean Hannity (of course) about the “standoff.”
“We want freedom,” Bundy said. I don’t know what freedom Bundy’s talking about. He does not own the land nor does he even pay the modest fees required to use it. Thousands of ranchers across the West pay fees for their businesses, but Bundy thinks he should get to use public resources to make a personal profit. Cliven Bundy, far from being a patriot, is also clearly a straight-up communist.
Bundy is using the language of freedom, patriotism and outright paranoia to further his business interests. He succeeded wildly in drawing other “patriots” to his slice of contested desert. I don’t know these exact people, but the words and phrases they used were the nursery rhymes of my childhood. I’ve been listening to ignorant people bitch about the federal “gub’met,” since I could crawl, and I’m weary of it. I can’t bear to hear poor people rally to the defense of moneyed interests like mining and ranching, like well-trained, bleating sheep. As tired and silly as I find his language, clearly it worked. He so inflamed the lunatic militia movement, that many rallied to him, often from out of state, with guns and naked threats. They created a real possibility that someone might get killed, so the feds backed down.
“A Befuddled Old Man”: John McCain Attempts To Publish A Column In A Communist Newspaper From The Distant Past
Sen. John McCain, a man of his word, published his editorial — a stirring defense of the rights to free speech, dissent and political expression — in Russia’s Pravda, just like he said he would.
One small problem: As people are now finally pointing out, this isn’t the famous Pravda. After the Soviet Union was made to collapse, its official propaganda organ was sold off and eventually closed. There is no more “Pravda,” omnipresent national newspaper in which the Kremlin disseminates the party line to the oppressed masses. There is now Pravda, the struggling, thrice-weekly organ of the remains of the Communist Party, and Pravda.ru, a sensationalistic online-only news site few people in Russia take seriously.
So, after Vladimir Putin published a provocative column in America’s most prominent and trusted newspaper, John McCain basically submitted his response to the Russian equivalent of the Daily Blaze. After you read his impassioned words, you can scroll down to Pravda’s enlightening “photos of celebrities” section. Or why not check out Lady Pravda for your love and beauty tips? McCain really couldn’t have found a better way to illustrate that he’s a befuddled Cold War relic with no idea whatsoever what Russia is like in 2013.
Sen. McCain was goaded into this by Foreign Policy’s John Hudson, and some, like Dave Weigel, did point out earlier that McCain was effectively being pranked into submitting his serious editorial to a conspiracy site capitalizing on a famous name.
But there’s no one McCain can blame but himself. A few minutes of research — or any working knowledge of modern Russia, I guess — would’ve saved McCain some embarrassment. He almost got it right, sort of. One of Russia’s bigger newspapers is Komsomolskaya Pravda, or Komsomol Truth — not to be confused with plain “Truth” — and today Komsomol Truth is straight-up mocking McCain. Here is the very bad Google translation:
Iron man, U.S. Senator John McCain. He promised to write a column in the “truth” and did. True, “Pravda.Ru”, but this is small. You could have a “spark” to write “, but did not find, I guess. Or did not know what was, and a newspaper.
(“Spark” was the pre-revolution socialist newspaper run by Lenin and his allies. It ceased publishing in 1905.)
If McCain had wanted to write in a Soviet-era paper for the symbolism, he could’ve picked one of the ones that are still publishing. Pravda was the official paper of the party, but the USSR had lots of newspapers, and not all of them are now defunct. The Soviet Union’s actual “paper of record,” Izvestia, is still around, and today it has a fun interview with the chairman of “Pravda.ru” in which it repeatedly asks him how and why McCain published an Op-Ed at his website instead of at an actual newspaper, like Izvestia.
Even if he’d picked an actual newspaper, McCain’s central conceit would still have been wrong. “A Russian citizen could not publish a testament like the one I just offered,” he wrote in his editorial after some boilerplate about the importance of self-determination. That is not remotely true. Russia has hundreds of daily newspapers representing a broad array of viewpoints. There are pro-Kremlin papers and pro-opposition papers. Russia has, in Novaya Gazeta, an award-winning investigative newspaper. Russians have access to anti-Putin journalism if they want it. The state, as I understand it, recognized long ago that controlling television is more useful than censoring newspapers. McCain could’ve easily placed his column in an actual newspaper that prints actual copies that actual Russians read, and I can’t imagine why any paper would’ve been scared to print it. (It’s far too ridiculous.)
If McCain’s mission was to prove that the United States is run by solipsistic buffoons who don’t even try to understand anything about the rest of the world before they go blundering out shouting hypocritical nonsense about freedom, well, mission accomplished. Way to make Putin look like a wise and prudent statesman, Senator.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, September 20, 2013
“First Impressions”: Ted Cruz Is The Next Jim DeMint
As the old saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. That isn’t to say that first impressions are necessarily immutable destiny in politics, since there are those who have bombed in their national debut and turned things around, and others who looked terrific at first but turned out to be something less. Bill Clinton gave a famously terrible speech at the 1988 Democratic convention, and Sarah Palin was dynamite in her speech at the GOP’s 2008 gathering. Nevertheless, there are some things you just can’t overcome, particularly if what caused them wasn’t a bad night’s sleep but the very core of your being.
A year or two ago, if you asked Republicans to list their next generation of stars, Ted Cruz’s name would inevitably have come up. Young (he’s only 42), Latino (his father emigrated from Cuba), smart (Princeton, Harvard Law) and articulate (he was a champion debater), he looked like someone with an unlimited future. But then he got to Washington and started acting like the reincarnation of Joe McCarthy, and now, barely a month into his Senate career, we can say with a fair degree of certainty that Ted Cruz is not going to be the national superstar many predicted he’d be. If things go well, he might be the next Jim DeMint—the hard-line leader of the extremist Republicans in the Senate, someone who helps the Tea Party and aids some right-wing candidates win primaries over more mainstream Republicans. But I’m guessing that like DeMint, he won’t ever write a single piece of meaningful legislation and he’ll give the Republican party nothing but headaches as it struggles to look less like a party of haters and nutballs.
It’s kind of remarkable how quickly things went south for Cruz. First he made a splash at Chuck Hagel’s confirmation hearings by implying, without any evidence, that Hagel was on the payroll of foreign enemies. Lindsay Graham called it “out of bounds,” and even grumpy John McCain, who hates Hagel’s guts, rebuked him. Then on Friday, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker revealed that in 2010, Cruz made a speech in which he charged that when he was at Harvard Law School, “there were twelve [members of the faculty] who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” This is what scholars of rhetoric call a lie. By way of explanation, his spokesperson said that what Cruz said was accurate, since there are people on the Harvard Law faculty who advocate Critical Legal Studies, which back on Planet Earth does not actually involve overthrowing the United States government. It’s kind of like someone saying, “Ted Cruz advocates stoning disrespectful children to death,” then saying that the statement is true, because Cruz once approvingly quoted the biblically-derived saying “spare the rod, spoil the child.” (For the record, I have no idea if Cruz approves of corporal punishment, nor if he has actually participated in any child-stonings.)
So the idea that Ted Cruz is an up-and-comer with a bright future is pretty much dead, replaced by the idea that Ted Cruz is an ideological extremist who employs some of the most shameful political tactics you can imagine, including just making stuff up about people he doesn’t like. Maybe this was inevitable, since by all accounts he really is kind of a jerk, and really does have some crazy ideas. He may end up a favorite of right-wing talk radio, and a hero to Tea Partiers, but he’s not going to be a real power in Washington.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 25, 2013
“The Red Menace Of Texas”: Ted Cruz’s McCarthyism And The Christian Right
The wonderful Jane Mayer recounts an Americans for Prosperity rally she covered in Texas two and half years ago, at which now-Texas Senator Ted Cruz “accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there” in the early 1990s. The revelation of these baseless, McCarthy-esque accusations sheds light on the origins of Cruz’s baseless, McCarthy-esque questioning of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel. (The best part of Mayer’s piece is the bewilderment of Charles Fried, a Republican who served in the Reagan administration and later taught Cruz at Harvard, who diplomatically told Mayer that Cruz’s statement “lacks nuance.”)
Mayer adds:
[Cruz] then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Cruz’s communist conspiracy theories pre-date his Tea Party associations; in 2009, he gave an interview to Marvin Olasky, editor of the evangelical WORLD magazine, and former provost of The King’s College in New York City. In the WORLD Q&A, Cruz made the same accusation about Obama and Harvard:
Q: Then on to Harvard Law School: What was that like? Understanding Harvard Law School is very important to understanding our president, Barack Obama. He is very much a creature of Harvard Law. To understand what that means you have to understand that there were more self-declared communists on the Harvard faculty than there were Republicans. Every single idea this president has proposed in the nine months he’s been in office has been orthodox wisdom in the Harvard faculty lounge.
Q: Why are they so far to the left? The communists on the Harvard faculty are generally not malevolent; they generally were raised in privilege, have never worked very hard in their lives, don’t understand where jobs and opportunity come from. If you asked the Harvard faculty to vote on whether this nation should become a socialist nation, 80 percent of the faculty would vote yes and 10 percent would think that was too conservative.
About a year later, in 2010, I heard Olasky interview David Noebel, one of the leading lights, as it were, of the Christian anti-communist movement and founder of the “Christian worldview” educational organization, Summit Ministries. Olasky hosted Noebel for an audience at The King’s College (the evangelical former home to the disgraced Obama conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza). The pair recounted the Cruz comments about Harvard with noticeable glee, and Olasky was so admiring of Cruz that he predicted he’d be a “future president of the United States.” About Harvard Law School, Noebel added, Cruz “told you the truth about who’s involved there.”
Noebel would know about how to make wild accusations about the “red menace” in the halls of power; in his book, You Can Still Trust the Communists To be Communists (Socialists and Progressives too), a 2010 reissue of the 1960 edition by the Christian anti-communist Fred Schwarz, who died in 2009, Noebel extensively quotes the Cruz WORLD interview to explain how Obama “has been swimming in radical, shark-infested Socialist waters for much of his life.” Noebel also insists that “most Americans are totally unaware that the US House of Representatives crawls with a large, well-organized assembly of Socialist organizations,” and that these organizations “quite literally comprise a Socialist Red Army within the very contours of the House of Representatives.” This is all owing to members of Congress not adhering to Noebel’s “Christian worldview,” which he claims is locked in a cosmic conflict with other “worldviews,” specifically Islam, secular humanism, Marxism-Leninism, cosmic humanism, and post-modernism.
In the WORLD interview, Cruz took care to point out that he “was raised a Christian and came to Christ at Clay Road Baptist Church in Houston. In terms of political views, I’m a plain and simple conservative: I’m a fiscal conservative, I’m a social conservative. I think there are absolute truths about what is right and about what works.”
In the postscript of his book, Noebel asserts that Schwarz “greatly influenced the newly rising conservative movement that ultimately produced leaders” including Ronald Reagan, James Dobson, Olasky, Tim LaHaye, Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Buckley, Jerry Falwell, and others. Perhaps he can now add Cruz to that list.
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, February 22, 2013
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