“Absurd Revisionist History”: Ted Cruz Is A Chip Off A Crazy Old Block
Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul’s recent foray into 9/11 trutherism has revived questions about how his fringe politics could affect his son’s presidential ambitions. But Rand Paul isn’t the only White House aspirant with a political anchor in the family.
During an August 21 meeting of the Western Williamson Republican Club, Pastor Rafael Cruz — father of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) — attempted to explain that black Americans “need to be educated” about the real history of the civil rights movement, and that “the average black” doesn’t understand the minimum wage.
Cruz ran into trouble recounting a recent conversation that he had with a black pastor.
“I said, as a matter of fact, ‘Did you know that civil rights legislation was passed by Republicans? It was passed by a Republican Senate under the threat of a filibuster by the Democrats,’” Cruz told the group, as reported by BuzzFeed. “‘Oh, I didn’t know that.’ And then I said, ‘Did you know that every member of the Ku Klux Klan were Democrats from the South?’ ‘Oh I didn’t know that.’ You know, they need to be educated.”
“Jason Riley said in an interview, Did you know before we had minimum-wage laws black unemployment and white unemployment were the same?” he added, referring to the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board member. “If we increase the minimum wage, black unemployment will skyrocket. See, he understands it, but the average black does not.”
Cruz’s assertions are riddled with factual inaccuracies. For starters, casting conservatives as the real heroes of the civil rights movement requires an absurd revisionist history (nevermind the fact that Republicans didn’t actually control the Senate in 1964).
Cruz is similarly off base on the effects of increasing the minimum wage. Both professional economists and recent history strongly dispute the notion that guaranteeing workers $10.10 per hour will cause unemployment to “skyrocket.” And, contrary to Cruz’s warning, “the average black” would actually disproportionately benefit from such an increase.
Additionally, Pastor Cruz’s riffing on the intelligence of “the average black” probably won’t help Republicans if they choose to revive their disastrously failed outreach to minorities before the 2016 presidential election. And that could be a problem for Senator Cruz.
Ted Cruz has made no apologies for his close personal and professional relationship with his father, who has been described as a “power broker” within the senator’s political organization. He has even used a Senate aide to book his father’s paid speeches, like the one given to the Western Williamson Republican Club. That means that, if Senator Cruz does pursue an oft-rumored presidential bid, he will have to answer for his father’s radical rhetoric. After all, not many serious presidential candidates have close advisors who believe that the California drought is the result of a United Nations plot to confiscate private property, or that the president is a secret Muslim who will force the elderly to undergo “suicide counseling,” or that evolution is a communist lie, among many other outrageous conspiracy theories. Cruz would have a difficult enough time convincing the electorate that he is mainstream enough to serve as president; his father’s regular outbursts will only make it harder.
Pastor Cruz believes that President Obama was “brainwashed for 18 years” by listening to the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. What does that mean for Ted Cruz, who has been listening to his father for a lifetime?
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, September 3, 2014
“Doomsday Prepper Economics”: The Weird Obsession That’s Ruining The GOP
Call it doomsday prepper economics. For more than five years, many Republicans and conservatives have warned that catastrophe is nigh. Washington’s deficit spending and the Federal Reserve’s excessive money printing will lead to a financial crisis worse than the Great Recession, they prophesied. Inflation will skyrocket, the dollar will collapse, and the Chinese will dump treasuries, they swore. As Ron Paul, the libertarian former GOP congressman and presidential candidate, said back in 2009: “More inflation is absolutely the wrong way to go. We’re taking a recession and trying to turn it into a depression. We’re going to see a real calamity.”
Many GOP politicians have since echoed Paul’s prediction. But the Next Great Inflation never happened. The Consumer Price Index, including food and energy, has risen by an annual average of just 1.6 percent since 2008, below the Fed’s 2 percent inflation target. During the Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, by contrast, prices rose five times faster.
This information isn’t a secret. The Labor Department releases inflation data monthly on its website. Yet inflation fears still rage on the right. Those concerns are a big reason why Republicans continue to push for a balanced budget ASAP. They’re why the GOP wants to saddle the Fed with restrictive new rules.
Regardless of the potential merits of those policy ideas, the inflation alarmism driving them is taking a weird turn. Some Republicans and conservatives now argue that Washington is figuring inflation all wrong, maybe even intentionally. Better, they say, to trust independent outside sources such as the website ShadowStats, which “exposes and analyzes flaws” in government economic data. According to one set of ShadowStats calculations, the true inflation rate is nearly 10 percent today. The inflation truth is out there.
In a recent National Review Online article, conservative author Amity Shlaes approvingly cites ShadowStats as supporting her thesis that “inflation is higher than what the official data suggest.” Others fans include conservative intellectual Niall Ferguson, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), and a good chunk of the conservative blogosphere.
ShadowStats’ popularity on the right is crazy — because the site’s methodology has been roundly ridiculed by both economists and business journalists. Critics also note that the subscription price for the ShadowStats newsletter has remained unchanged for years. Inflation for thee, but not for me. Beyond that, MIT’s Billion Price Project, which tracks prices from online retailers every day, puts U.S. inflation at just over 2 percent. And consider this: If inflation were really 10 percent, that would mean the real economy, adjusted for inflation, has been sharply shrinking — yet somehow still adding 2 million net new jobs a year.
If GOP inflationistas had their way, the weak U.S. recovery would almost surely be even weaker. Just look at Europe. Unlike the Fed, the inflation-phobic European Central Bank sat on its hands despite weak growth. The result has been an unemployment rate nearly twice America’s and a nasty double-dip recession. Of course, inflation is lower than in America — so low, in fact, that the region risks a dangerous deflationary spiral of falling prices and falling wages.
Why this GOP inflation obsession? Maybe it’s a legacy of how rapidly rising prices in the 1970s swept conservatives into power in both America and Great Britain. Maybe it’s how many conservative talk radio shows are sponsored by gold companies who stand to benefit from inflation hysteria. Maybe it’s a belief that every single economic metric must be a nightmare under President Obama.
But whatever the reason, the GOP’s preoccupation with phantom price increases is distracting it from the actual problems afflicting the U.S. economy — such as low social mobility, stagnant wages, and the decline of middle-class work. The price of not addressing those issues is rising every year. And that is the kind of inflation worth obsessing over.
By: James Pethokoukis, DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute: The Week, July 23, 2014
“Rand Paul Is A Deeply Cynical Politician”: It’s Hard To Spot The Conviction But The Hypocrisy Is Evident
When Washingtonians refer to Rand Paul as a different breed of politician than his father, they generally mean it in a good way. The implication is that he is more pragmatic and tactical (probably more tactful, too); that his worldview has broader appeal. Whereas Ron Paul is way too much of a crank to ever have a shot of winning the GOP presidential nomination, Rand increasingly looks like a contender.
But whatever you might think about the elder Paul, you can say this for him: He is not cynical. He is a conviction politician, however repugnant some of us may find his convictions. The younger Paul? Well, he certainly styles himself a man of conviction. But at this point in his presidential quest, it’s getting hard to say for sure.
Take this story on Rand Paul’s “evolving” foreign policy views in Saturday’s New York Times. The premise of the piece is that Paul is being somewhat unfairly attacked by the hawkish wing of his party, whose members often fail to see the distinction between his father’s isolationism and his more nuanced brand of non-interventionism. As evidence, the piece adduces this rather eye-catching data point:
Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of [GOP mega-donor Sheldon] Adelson’s, said that when he pressed Mr. Paul to explain his position on aid to Israel in a recent meeting in the senator’s Washington office, Mr. Klein left reassured. “He said if there was a vote and for any reason it seemed like it was actually going to be close, he would vote for it,” Mr. Klein said.
So, if Klein’s account is correct (and the Times presumably ran it by Senator Paul), what we have is as follows: Paul’s public position is that we should cut off all foreign aid, including aid to Israel, which he dubbed “welfare” back in 2011. But if Paul were ever in a position to end aid to Israel—which is to say, the only time his personal position would really matter—he would abandon that position, and instead vote to ensure that the aid continues.
I’m not sure I can think of a more irresponsible position. If Rand Paul thinks aid to Israel is truly important, then it’s deeply cynical to badmouth that aid simply because bad-mouthing appeals to the type of voter he’s courting. And if he thinks aid to Israel is irredeemably wasteful, then it’s deeply cynical to fink out when given the opportunity to roll it back. Either way, it’s hard to spot the conviction here.
In fairness, Paul did try to resolve this tension at another event, telling the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition that, in the Times’ paraphrasing, “while he would eventually like to terminate all foreign aid, he knew that would not be realistic now.” The most charitable interpretation of this riff is that Paul would like to cut off aid as soon as possible, but realizes you can’t do it abruptly without triggering major blowback among U.S. allies that would damage our standing around the world. That would indeed speak to his pragmatism.
But this interpretation seems like a stretch given that Paul’s comments appear to have been a lot less coherent than that, or at least less specific. “You could see he was a work in progress,” former George W. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer, who attended the meeting, told the Times. Instead, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Paul is simply trying to reassure neoconservatives that he’ll be with them on the issue they care about most, but without junking a big source of his political appeal. That’s not an “evolution.” It’s hypocrisy.
By: Norm Scheiber, The New Republic, May 26, 2014
“Deadbeat On The Range”: The Phony Cliven Bundy Event Has Brought Out The Worst Of The Gun-Waving Far Right
Imagine a vendor on the National Mall, selling burgers and dogs, who hasn’t paid his rent in 20 years. He refuses to recognize his landlord, the National Park Service, as a legitimate authority. Every court has ruled against him, and fines have piled up. What’s more, the effluents from his food cart are having a detrimental effect on the spring grass in the capital.
Would an armed posse come to his defense, aiming their guns at the park police? Would the lawbreaker get prime airtime on Fox News, breathless updates in the Drudge Report, a sympathetic ear from Tea Party Republicans? No, of course not.
So what’s the difference between the fictional loser and Cliven Bundy, the rancher in Nevada who owes the government about $1 million and has been grazing his cattle on public land for more than 20 years? Near as I can tell, one wears a cowboy hat. Easterners, especially clueless ones in politics and the press, have always had a soft spot for a defiant white dude in a Stetson.
This phony event has brought out the worst of the gun-waving far right, and the national politicians who are barely one degree of separation from them. Hundreds of heavily armed, camouflaged supporters of the scofflaw turned out Saturday in Nevada, training their rifles on public employees who were trying to do their job. The outsiders looked like snipers ready to shoot the police. If you changed that picture to Black Panthers surrounding a lawful eviction in the inner city, do you think right-wing media would be there cheering the outlaws?
With their assault rifles and threats, the thugs in the desert forced federal officials with the Bureau of Land Management to back down from a court-ordered confiscation of Bundy’s cattle. One of the rancher’s supporters, Richard Mack, a Tea Party leader who is in the National Rifle Association’s Hall of Fame, said he planned to use women as human shields in a violent showdown with law enforcement.
“We were actually strategizing to put all the women up front,” Mack said in a radio interview. “If they were going to start shooting, it’s going to be women that are going to be televised all across the world getting shot.”
That’s who Fox and friends are playing with these days — militia extremists who would sacrifice their wives to make some larger point about a runaway federal government. And what’s more, the Fox host Sean Hannity has all but encouraged a violent confrontation.
At the center of the dispute is the 68-year-old rancher Bundy, who said in a radio interview, “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing.” A real patriot, this guy. You would think that kind of anarchist would draw a raised eyebrow from the Tea Party establishment that provides Bundy his media oxygen. After all, wasn’t the Tea Party born in a rant by Rick Santelli of CNBC about deadbeat homeowners? He complained about taxpayers’ subsidizing “losers’ mortgages” and he said we should “reward people that can carry the water instead of drinking the water.” Believe me, Bundy’s cattle are drinking an awful lot of our water, and not paying for it.
But instead, people like Ron Paul have only fanned the flames, warning of a Waco-style assault. Paul and his son, Senator Rand Paul, further showed themselves to be stunningly ignorant of the public lands legacy created by forward-thinking Republicans a century ago. “They had virtual ownership of that land because they had been using it,” Ron Paul said on Fox, referring to the Bundy clan. “You need the government out of it, and I think that’s the important point.”
No, the renegade rancher has no more right to 96,000 acres of Nevada public range than a hot dog vendor has to perpetual space on the Mall. Both places belong to the American people. Bundy runs his cattle on our land — that is, turf owned by every citizen. The agency that oversees the range, the Bureau of Land Management, allows 18,000 grazing permits on 157 million acres. Many of those permit holders get a sweet deal, subsidized in a way they could never find on private land.
What’s more, the land is supposed to be managed for stewardship and other users. Wild-horse advocates would like a piece of the same range. The poor desert tortoise, which has been in Nevada a lot longer than Bundy’s Mormon pioneer stock, is disappearing because of abusive grazing on that same 96,000 acres.
Ranching is hard work. Drought and market swings make it a tough go in many years. That’s all the more reason to praise the 18,000 or so ranchers who pay their grazing fees on time and don’t go whining to Fox or summoning a herd of armed thugs when they renege on their contract. You can understand why the Nevada Cattlemen’s Association wants no part of Bundy.
These kinds of showdowns are rare because most ranchers play by the rules, and quietly go about their business. They are heroes, in one sense, preserving a way of life that has an honorable place in American history. The good ones would never wave a gun in the face of a public servant, and likely never draw a camera from Fox.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, April 17, 2014
“No Separating The Son From The Father”: What Rand Paul Can Learn From George W. Bush’s Daddy Issues
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently told my Daily Caller colleague Alex Pappas that he has “pretty much quit answering” questions about his controversial father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
Referencing George W. Bush’s campaign for president in 2000, Paul continued: “Did he get tons of questions about his dad? … I don’t know that he did, to tell you the truth.”
This is a silly semantic game for Paul to play. Whether or not George W. Bush was directly asked a lot of questions about George H.W. Bush in the run-up to the 2000 race is almost irrelevant. Because it is something close to an irrefutable fact that the elder Bush has loomed large over W.’s career and life for decades. In the minds of millions of Americans, there was no separating the son from the father — much in the same way there is no separating Hillary from Bill, or Jeb from a pair of Georges.
A simple search of the news archives is telling. As far back as 1978, when George W. Bush lost a bid for Congress, Bush declared: “We don’t need dad in this race.” When his opponent attacked him over his family connections and pedigree, Bush responded: “Would you like me to run as Sam Smith? The problem is I can’t abandon my background. I’m not trying to hide behind any facade.”
George H.W. Bush was a congressman, director of the CIA, vice president, and president. It is a legacy no son could escape — particularly a son who entered his father’s profession.
Ron Paul does not have nearly the record that the first President Bush did. But he is still a leading political figure in his own right. Perhaps the country’s most famous libertarian, the maverick congressman from Texas has an extremely passionate following, and became a nationally known figure thanks to several failed presidential bids. Rand Paul is kidding himself if he thinks he won’t have to deal with his dad’s legacy.
If after four years in the political limelight, Rand is already tired of answering questions about his dad, well, he’s got a long haul ahead of him. The “fortunate son” charge first lodged against Bush in 1978 was leveled more than two decades later, during the 2000 GOP primary. “If [John] McCain’s book is titled Faith of My Fathers,” quipped Margaret Carlson, “Bush’s should be called Friends of My Father.”
Of course, George W. Bush also faced the challenge of subtly distancing himself from his father’s “read my lips” flip-flopping image, without throwing the old man under the bus. Today, it’s easy to see 41 as a wise old statesman, but in 1999 and 2000, skeptical conservatives still didn’t trust the Bush clan.
The good news for the younger Bush was that after eight years of President Bill Clinton, Republicans were desperate for a winner (and the perception of being a winner can cover a multitude of perceived sins).
And for us mainstream conservatives, word had gotten out that Dubya was more conservative than his father — that he was “one of us.” He came of age studying Lee Atwater’s campaign style and Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy, we were told. The son was not like the father, the whispers went, answering questions we all had, even if they weren’t asked of the candidate himself.
Good luck finding any contemporaneous documentation to back this up, mind you. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We conservatives were somewhat quiet about it. But a 2003 Bill Keller article retroactively confirms this messaging: “That Bush is Reaganesque is a conceit that some conservatives have wishfully, tentatively embraced since he emerged as a candidate, and one that Bush himself has encouraged,” Keller noted. “The party faithful have been pining for a new Reagan since Reagan, and for Bush the analogy has the added virtue of providing an alternative political lineage; he’s not Daddy’s Boy, he’s Reagan Jr.” (Emphasis added)
For all the talk about Poppy and Dubya — and I’m sure they have a strong bond — the backers of George W. Bush had to burn a lot of calories distancing the son from his old man. And this lasted well into his presidency. “When Bob Woodward asked President Bush if he had consulted with his father about the decision to go to war in Iraq,” Bob Herbert recalled in 2005, “the president famously replied, ‘There is a higher father that I appeal to.'”
Similarly, Rand cannot escape his father, just as Jeb and George W. couldn’t, and just as Hillary Clinton cannot escape her husband. “Hillary Clinton spent eight years in the Senate and four at the State Department,” says Dave Weigel, “but has to answer for her husband’s actions in the mid-1990s. Paul, with three years behind him in the Senate, says he does not have to answer for what his father does right now.”
I’m not sure it’s fair to judge anyone based on the sins of their father, the successes of their father, or whom they’re married to. But these comparisons and questions are inescapable, and have always been so. Rand Paul cannot appeal to historical precedence to evade comparisons to his dad. Because fair or not, voters still want to know how far the apple falls from the tree — and they always have.
By: Matt K. Lewis, The Week, March 24, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 