“A Crass Political Stunt”: Christians Enraged With Cruz Over Pro-Israel Comments
Christian writers are incensed with Sen. Ted Cruz, and argue that the Texas senator is putting politics before his fellow religious brethren.
Cruz was the keynote speaker Wednesday evening at a dinner put on by In Defense of Christians, a group dedicated to raising awareness about persecuted Christians in the Middle East. During his speech, the Texas senator argued that Christians have “no greater ally” than Israel. Soon after, heckling from the crowd cut off his remarks, and an address that started by emphasizing the unity of Christians ended with shouting and disagreement.
“If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you,” Cruz told the audience as he walked off the stage.
Much of his pro-Israel conservative base would have had no problem with these comments, so Cruz may not have expected a backlash. But the response among key Christian thinkers and writers was fierce and immediate.
Cruz was accused of ignorance about the dynamics of Middle Eastern Christianity; of suggesting that he would not stand with Christians who didn’t agree with his political stance on Israel; even of orchestrating a crass stunt on the backs of persecuted Christians.
“Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that holding the same political views on Israel was more important than the fellowship we share as Christians,” Mollie Hemingway, a senior writer at The Federalist, a conservative website, told The Daily Beast. “We shouldn’t fight the global persecution of Christians only if the victims share our political views.”
Added Mark Tooley, the president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy: “Must overseas Christians pass a political litmus test, even if it further endangers them, to gain American support and sympathy?”
Jeff King, the president of the watchdog group International Christian Concern, said that Cruz was “off-topic and rude” (the crowd was rude too, King added), but mainly did not understand the nuances of the persecuted Christian minority groups he was addressing.
“They can’t be pro-Israel where they live, because they will get the snot beaten out of them or worse. If you don’t understand the dynamics going in… you’ve got to question what he was thinking,” King said. “He just doesn’t understand the reality of Middle Eastern Christians.”
Others went so far as to question whether Cruz purposely went to the conference as a stunt, that he was aware of the dynamics and wanted to show that he would support Israel in front of an audience where this would be unpopular.
“He used arguably the most persecuted and powerless minority in the world, Middle Eastern Christians, who are supposed to be his brethren in Christ, as a prop for a self-aggrandizing political stunt,” said Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a Catholic writer, in The Week.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was particularly scathing, pointing out that Cruz’s “co-religionists are being murdered.”
“[B]y making a statement at *this* event, he basically flipped the bird to people and churches that are dying right now,” he tweeted.
Some conservative websites weighed in in support of Cruz, but may have overstepped in doing so—with two websites implying that the Middle Eastern Christians present at the event were not Christians at all.
Both Breitbart News and Townhall wrote defenses that put the word “Christian” in scare quotes—as if those who heckled Cruz might not appropriately be termed so. Breitbart has since taken down the quotation marks.
Christian writers were mixed on whether Cruz’s remarks could have an enduring political effect.
“There are potential repercussions—particularly if this becomes a trend. To be sure, there is often a stark dichotomy between so-called opinion leaders and rank and file believers. But there’s a reason they’re called leaders,” Daily Caller writer Matt Lewis, who was critical of Cruz’s speech, told the Beast. “The folks who have voiced concern about his actions buy ink by the barrel and paper by the ton, and people turn to them for interpreting events. There is always the potential for this sort of thing to trickle down.”
Countered Tooley, “Religious persecution has rarely been major issue in electoral politics.”
Democrats might also seek to capitalize on Cruz’s statement. Michael Wear, a strategist who led White House evangelical outreach during President Obama’s first term, said that Republican “voters will be looking for a candidate who can support Israel without demeaning an audience gathered to defend persecuted religious groups, a cause Senator Cruz has now distracted from in order to defend himself.”
Catherine Frazier, a Cruz spokeswoman, told the Beast that the senator will continue to speak out on behalf of religious minorities everywhere, and has made a point of bringing public attention to persecuted Christians in particular.
“He does not agree or stand with those who do not believe that Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state,” Frazier said. “But that does not change his passion and priority for standing with persecuted Christians across the region and across the world.”
In the meantime, however, Cruz’s remarks appear to have at least temporarily shattered Christian solidarity on the issue of persecuted Christian minorities.
“Fighting persecution of Christians is a unifying message among voters, particularly on the right,” Hemingway said. “For better or worse, Cruz’s political speech may have broken that unity.”
By: Tim Mak, The Daily Beast, September 12, 2014
“Pretending To Be Relevant”: Man Who Failed Twice At Becoming President Thinks He’d Be Better At Being President Than Hillary Clinton
Mitt Romney, once governor of Massachusetts and a failure at winning presidential elections, pops up every now and again to tell us that he is not running for president. These TV interviews can be grating, but they’re also charitable: Romney gets to pretend he actually is relevant, or even president, and his opinion is afforded the sort of faux-weight that only a Sunday news show can provide. It’s political cos-play.
This week, it was Romney on Barack Obama’s follies, and Romney on Hillary Clinton’s presidential bona fides.
You will likely not be surprised to hear that Romney shared his disappointment with Obama in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “I think the president is really out of touch with reality,” Romney said of the man who twice accomplished what he, himself, could not. “He’s so out of touch with reality that he hasn’t taken the necessary steps. . . . He’s too busy on the golf course. I don’t know if you can see the reality from the fairway, but he doesn’t see reality.” (Nailed it, Romney thought after letting go of that zinger.)
Obama’s foreign policy is fundamentally flawed because it is “based on common humanity, and humanity is not common,” Romney said. “Bad people do bad things.” Apparently the president is not hip to the fact that ISIS is “bad.”
Romney is, per Romney, a more skilled politician that not just the current president, but also the Democratic frontrunner for 2016. Asked if he would deliver a better performance in the White House than Clinton, Romney said there was “no question in my mind,” though he conceded one complicating factor: “The American people may disagree with me.”
During both of his failed presidential campaigns, Romney tried to use his record as a businessman as proof that he knew how to run the government (because he ran companies, remember?). He repeated that winning line on Sunday: “You’ve also got to have people who have actually run something. . . . I don’t think Hillary Clinton has that experience.”
“My time has come and gone,” Romney said, during the nationally televised interview.
If Romney changes his mind and reneges on his oft-repeated promise not to run for president again, perhaps he can point to comments by high-profile supporters such as himself as evidence of his political vitality. In Mitt he trusts.
By: Kia Makarechi, Vanity Fair Daily, September 8, 2014
“It’s Actually Revealing Talk”: Quotes Of The Day; On Obama’s ‘Deep Belief’
Every once in a while, a politician speaks the truth. Today, that politician is Georgia Republican Jack Kingston, talking about the possibility of Congress voting on a resolution authorizing President Obama to use force in Iraq and possibly Syria against ISIS. Behold:
“A lot of people would like to stay on the sideline and say, ‘Just bomb the place and tell us about it later,’ ” said Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, who supports having an authorization vote. “It’s an election year. A lot of Democrats don’t know how it would play in their party, and Republicans don’t want to change anything. We like the path we’re on now. We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well and ask what took him so long.”
Now that is some serious candor. Not that it isn’t anything a hundred pundits might observe (because it’s true), but it’s not often you catch a politician being so forthright, particularly when he’s talkiong about his own party. How can such a thing be explained?
It’s not complicated: Jack Kingston is retiring. He ran for Senate this year (unsuccessfully), and in order to do so, he had to give up his House seat. So he has been liberated.
And as long as we’re on the subject of people being candid (or not), there’s another quote I want to point out from the same newspaper. In an article about President Obama saying some things that have gotten him into trouble (I’m not even going to use the “g” word), we get this little gem:
To Mr. Obama’s critics, the disparity between the president’s previous statements and today’s reality reflects not simply poorly chosen words but a fundamentally misguided view of the world. Rather than clearly see the persistent dangers as the United States approaches the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, they said, Mr. Obama perpetually imagines a world as he wishes it were.
“I don’t think it is just loose talk, I think it’s actually revealing talk,” said Peter H. Wehner, a former adviser to President George W. Bush now at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Sometimes words are mistakes; they’re just poorly put. But sometimes they’re a manifestation of one’s deep belief in the world and that’s what you really get with President Obama.”
So there you have it: when my guy says something that in retrospect looks misguided or mistaken, his words are just a slip of the tongue, revealing nothing (and if memory serves, Wehner’s old boss did say a few such things). But when your guy does the same, his words reveal his true nature. But only the words we don’t like! When he says things that turn out to be true or wise or right, that’s just a bunch of phony baloney and you can ignore it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 9, 2014
“The Return Of The Ruthless Cyborg”: Republicans Just Can’t Get Enough Of Dick Cheney
It was just a few months ago when the Republican Study Committee, a group of far-right House GOP lawmaker, invited former Vice President Dick Cheney to Capitol Hill to complain about President Obama for a while. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), now a member of the House GOP leadership, said at the time, in reference to Cheney, “He’s got a lot of credibility when it comes to talking about foreign policy.”
I don’t think he was kidding.
Apparently, this thinking remains quite pervasive among GOP lawmakers, who keep extending invitations to Cheney, his spectacular failures and incompetence notwithstanding. The Washington Post reported late yesterday:
The leading architect of the Iraq war will be on Capitol Hill for a private chat with House Republicans on Tuesday, just as Congress is grappling again with how involved the United States should be in the region’s snowballing unrest.
Yes, as in Dick Cheney, one of the war’s most ardent defenders. The former vice president was invited by the GOP’s campaign arm to speak at its first weekly conference meeting since Congress’s five-week break, a House GOP official confirmed.
It says something important about Republican lawmakers that to better understand international affairs, they not only keep turning to failed former officials, they keep seeking guidance from the same failed former official.
Indeed, this isn’t a situation in which Cheney was just wandering around, looking for someone who’d listen to his mindless condemnations of the president who’s cleaning up Cheney’s messes, and GOP lawmakers agreed to listen as a courtesy. Rather, Congressional Republicans have gone out of their way to make the former V.P. one of their most sought after instructors.
Just in this Congress, Cheney has been on Capitol Hill advising GOP lawmakers over and over and over again.
It’s tempting to start the usual diatribe, highlighting all of Cheney’s horrific failures, his spectacular misjudgments, and his propensity for dishonesty on a breathtaking scale. But let’s skip that, stipulating that Cheney’s tenure in national office was a genuine disaster, the effects of which Americans will be dealing with for many years to come.
Let’s instead note how truly remarkable the timing of Cheney’s latest invitation to Capitol Hill is.
Republicans are concerned about the threat posed by ISIS? The group’s existence is largely the result of the disastrous war Cheney helped launch under false pretenses.
Republicans are outraged that the White House is completing a plan for the next phase of the U.S. counter-terrorism policy? Cheney’s the guy who helped invade Iraq without a plan for what would happen after the war began.
I talked to a Democratic source last night who also reminded me of the current circumstances in Iraq, which are illustrative of a larger point. During Cheney’s tenure, the U.S. policy in Iraq was incoherent – the Republican White House couldn’t figure out what to do about the terrorist threat, parts of which they inadvertently helped create; picked Maliki to run the country almost at random; and struggled to understand the value of political solutions.
President Obama, meanwhile, has been adept where Cheney was clueless – patiently pushing Maliki aside and helping produce tangible political results in Baghdad, including the ones we saw just yesterday.
I don’t imagine any of this will come up during today’s “private chat.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 9, 2014
“So Very 2002”: A National Amnesia About Our Experience In Iraq
Anyone who for some reason checked out of U.S. politics a month ago and then checked back in this week might well be startled to realize that the “problem” of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq had become a crisis, and for some an existential threat to the United States. What changed in that span of time? Did IS conquer some major new territory? Did Nouri al-Maliki hang on to power and thwart U.S./Iranian efforts to build a stronger Iraqi state? Is there evidence of IS possessing weapons of mass destruction?
I just threw in that last one as a reminder of how these things can get out of hand.
What actually seems to have happened is that IS cruelly executed two American journalists after trying to extort vast sums of money or perhaps even a change of U.S. policies. They’re threatening to execute more westerners in captivity, presumably with the same grim and barbaric ritual of videotaped beheadings. The images and the savagery behind them has momentarily produced national amnesia about our experience in Iraq over the last quarter century or so, and a decided bipartisan burst of war fever.
The President, Vice President and Secretary of State have issued various “this will not stand” declarations. According to an excellent report from HuffPost’s Sam Stein, there’s an instant consensus in Washington for more airstrikes and special ops attacks on IS; an effort to round up international support and commitments of assistance; and a reconsideration of U.S. wariness to engage more directly in Syria, where, of course, we have been supporting an anti-Assad coalition while avoiding the inconvenient fact that its most powerful component is IS.
You get the distinct sense the Obama administration is trying to preempt the lust for war emanating from a suddenly bellicose Republican Party, where even Rand Paul is strapping on the gunbelt and swaggering around making loose commitments of other people’s lives. Check out this report on the mood of the GOP from WaPo’s Sebastian Payne and Robert Costa:
A roiling national debate over how to deal with the radical Islamic State and other global hot spots has prompted a sudden shift in Republican politics, putting a halt to the anti-interventionist mood that had been gaining credence in the party.
The change is evident on the campaign trail ahead of the November midterm elections and in recent appearances by the GOP’s prospective 2016 presidential candidates, with a near-universal embrace of stronger military actions against the group that has beheaded two American journalists.
A hawkish tone has become integral to several key Republican Senate campaigns, with a group of candidates running in battleground states calling attention to their ties to veterans and their support for the U.S. military at every turn.
In contests in Iowa, Arkansas and Alaska — where Republicans are running for seats held by Democrats — the GOP candidates are military veterans and focusing much of their time extolling their expertise.
A thirst among many conservative activists for a more muscular U.S. foreign policy was clear over the weekend at a meeting of Americans for Prosperity, the tea-party-affiliated group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers. The loudest applause came when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a potential presidential candidate, called for bombing the Islamic State “back to the Stone Age.”
It’s feeling very, very 2002. The difference, of course, is that an opponent of the Iraq War is president at the moment, while Dick Cheney raves and snarls from the sidelines instead of deploying troops and crafting official lies. Like Digby, I hope Obama’s reluctance to articulate a “strategy” for “destroying” IS reflects an understanding that this task could indeed involve unacceptable costs and could definitively produce unintended consequences in an unstable region with multiple threats to U.S. security interests. But she’s right this hope could be naive:
Hysteria is building. The hawks sense that there’s action afoot. The Republicans are aroused at the prospect that this could change the dynamic in 2016. The Democrats are freaking out that someone might call them wimps.
The warship is sailing out of the harbor and once again we’re all just standing here on the shore screaming into the wind.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 4, 2014
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