Posted on 02/06/2016 1:23:54 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
There is a boisterous Oath Keeper leaking alcohol from every pore sitting three seats away from me in a Nashua, New Hampshire, middle school auditorium hosting a Ted Cruz town hall. I'm wondering if it's too late to change seats.
The guy is wearing a camouflage jacket that doesn't quite hide the bulging middle-age belly straining at the faded Patriots T-shirt underneath. He's carrying a sign that reads "Like a Cruz missile, Ted will destroy ISIS" on one side and "Cruzin West" on the other, a plea for the Texas senator to pick former Florida congressman Allen West as his vice-presidential candidate. He's loudly telling everyone within earshot that we need to start a Cruz/West chant at some point and is met with approving responses from some of the people around me.
I decide not to move. If the Oath Keeper or anyone else spies my reporter's notebook and asks what outlet I'm with, I'll say World Net Daily and hope no one pulls out an iPhone to check.
It's all part of the carnival atmosphere of a Ted Cruz event being held at Elm Street Middle School, an imposing Gothic building that, as I drove up in the dark amidst a driving rain, made me think of an insane asylum in a movie, a comparison that felt more than appropriate once I was inside. Old men in baseball caps bearing the names of military units, moms holding babies in one hand and Ted Cruz signs in the other. Three people by the stage waving flags (from left to right: American, Israeli, Gadsden). Two flat-screen TVs on either side of the stage are showing a campaign film of more cheering crowds, backed by patriotic music and conservative activist Brent Bozell talking about all the reasons he loves Ted Cruz.
This is the New Hampshire I came to find. This is the polished and professional political rally of the true believers, ecstatic in their fervor and their belief in the rightness of their cause. It's exhilarating and terrifying. As the late great Hunter S. Thompson might have said, this is the belly of the beast.
Cruz is often described as "oily," but that word doesn't really do him justice. In fact, he's so oleaginous he reminds one of the puddles covering the stained cement floor of a Jiffy Lube. It's not just a physical characteristic - though there is that; the man has a sheen about him - but also one of affect. When he strides out to a rapturous greeting from the crowd and walks along the edge of the stage slapping hands with people in the front row, it feels so studied that I can picture college-age Ted Cruz practicing this move in his Princeton dorm room.
The speech is filled with the usual bullshit that no one will call him on, even in a GOP debate, because all the candidates are trying to appeal to a base that has gone beyond reason and Earth’s orbit. But it’s worth rebutting a few of the lies here, if only for the benefit of future archaeologists picking through the ruins of our civilization if Ted Cruz winds up leading it.
For economic policy, Cruz has a plan to turbocharge the American economy. It seems to go something like this:
- Repeal Obamacare
- Institute a flat tax on all personal and business income
- Economic growth!!!!!
Never mind that this plan would yank health insurance from millions of people and blow a hole in the deficit, adding mountains to the nation's $19 trillion debt that he decried elsewhere in his sermon. "Repeal Obamacare" and "flat tax" are words that appeal to the deepest, most primitive part of the conservative lizard brain. Any downsides can just be blamed on liberals later on.
Another Cruz proposal involves eliminating five major government agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service. Which raises the question: Who will collect the taxes that people and businesses would still be paying even with a flat tax in place? You may as well just tell the crowd you're eliminating taxes altogether.
On his proposal to "carpet-bomb" ISIS, Cruz has been getting blasted by military leaders for weeks for a) not seeming to know what carpet bombing actually is, and b) not knowing that it's a war crime. But he hasn't changed his pitch. In Nashua he tells the crowd that during the first Gulf War in 1991, the United States flew 1,100 sorties a day against the Iraqi army, "carpet-bombing" it into oblivion so that all our ground forces had to do once the invasion began was mop up the shattered remnants of Sadaam Hussein's forces. This understanding of carpet bombing is wildly inaccurate. Cruz either does not know this, or more likely he does not care. I'm betting on the latter.
That's because he needs this audience, and every other audience, to believe in the holy rightness of his crusade. And if this crowd is any indication, he's succeeding. This rally has the feel of a campaign that could go all the way, no matter how dangerous the proposals driving it are.
Because these are the true believers, and true believers know that they are right and everyone else is not only wrong, but evil and stupid. (When Cruz mocks some environmental protesters who briefly interrupt him, the man sitting directly behind me yells with unsuppressed fury, "They're Bolsheviks!" I can almost feel the spittle on the back of my neck.) This is a darker place than the Donald Trump rally I attended the night before. There, one got the sense Trump's support was a mile wide but an inch deep. This, though, this is something more primal.
It's all enough to make one despair, and to pray to a God you don't believe in that something can stop this train, that some part of the GOP establishment can still rally to knock down this campaign or that there is a very finite percentage of even conservative voters to whom it will appeal. And also to get out of this auditorium before Cruz pulls a couple of vipers from a sack and everyone starts speaking in tongues.
And clinton and bernie are the best thing since ice cream
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Cubans who've lived under Communism for years are flooding over our porous borders in record numbers. Could some of them be as dangerous as jihadists?
Think about it.
. American cannot afford any more 'immigrants' to take care of.
We are 19 TRILLION dollars in debt.
Americans are suffering- for instance our elders and veterans, our hiways and bridges are falling apart.
I'm sure many Cubans are good people who are just trying to escape Communism for a better life- BUT WE CANNOT TAKE CARE OF THE WHOLE WORLD.
WE NEED TO TAKE CARE OF AMERICANS FIRST.
Do we dare elect a Cuban president?
What, if anything will he do about the Cuban invasion?
THINK ABOUT THIS.
NO kidding.
He seems to have done his homework and laid the groundwork. He knew they'd be coming for him from every side.
Not to mention that Cruz’s father fought on the side of the pro-Castro rebels. Then his father spent almost 50 years (1957-2005) in America off and on, before bothering to become a citizen.
You're using the Salon writer to support your position?
?
I'll repeat:
Cruz:....Just two weeks ago was the 25th anniversary of the first Persian Gulf War. When that war began, we had 8,000 planes. Today we have about 4,000. When that war began, we had 529 ships, today we have 272. You want to know what carpet-bombing is? It's what we did in the first Persian Gulf War: 1,100 air attacks a day, saturation bombing that utterly destroyed the enemy. Right now Barack Obama is launching about 15 and 30 air attacks a day. He's not arming the Kurds. We need to define the enemy, we need to rebuild the military, to defeat the enemy, and we need to be focused and lift the rules of engagement so we're not sending our fighting men and women into combat with their arms tied behind their backs. Jan 28, 2016
This guy is so enlightening. I am going to dump cruz and support bernie. Wow, now my life will be so easy and oil free.
Thank you know nothing know it all, you are what makes ameriker great.
CRUZ N WEST.
FORGET THE REST!
The cognitive dissonance of this moonbat is off the charts.
It is the typical anti-Christian diatribe puke coming from the Left. This type of bigotry infests the Lame Stream Media so bad it makes the Zika virus look like a case of indigestion. Like the Zika virus, it causes microcephaly to those exposed to it. I call such people Zer0 Infobots. For an example of them, watch this video from “Watters World” of students at University of Oregon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muXwSwhCH0w
Rafaek Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1939. His father, Rafael Cruz, was a salesman for RCA, originally from the Canary Islands, Spain. His mother, Emilia Laudelina Diaz, was a teacher.
Cruz states he joined the Cuban revolution at age 14 and "suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime" of dictator Fulgencio Batista. According to Cruz, as a teenager, he "didn't know Castro was a Communist". Cruz has stated in interviews that he fled Cuba at age 18 in 1957, after an attorney for the family bribed a Batista official to grant him an exit permit. Cruz said he left with $100 sewn into his underwear before the Battle of Santa Clara, in which the revolution toppled Batista on January 1, 1959.
A Cuban emigre, he knew little or no English when he arrived in Austin to study at the University of Texas. During interviews and on the campaign trail, Cruz' son Ted recalls his father telling him he worked his way through college as a dishwasher, making 50 cents an hour. Cruz graduated from the university with a degree in mathematics. A few years later he became a staunch critic of Castro after "the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent". Cruz recounts that his younger sister fought against the new regime in the counter-revolution and was consequently tortured. He remained regretful for his early support of Castro and expressed his remorse to his son on numerous occasions.
In 1959, Cruz married Julia Ann Garza (August 22, 1939-May 18, 2013), but divorced after a few years. She later became a professor at California State University, Stanislaus. They had two daughters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz (11/22/61-2011) and Roxana Lourdes Cruz (born November 18, 1962), a Greenville, Texas, physician. Miriam died in 2011. He has one grandson.
In his twenties, Cruz moved to New Orleans. In 1969, at his new oil company job, he met his second wife, Eleanor Elizabeth Darragh Wilson, a computer programmer from Delaware. Cruz and Wilson lived in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where their only child, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, was born. While in Calgary, the couple owned a seismic-data processing firm for oil drillers.
After Cruz graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, he was granted political asylum in the United States following the expiration of his student visa. He became a Canadian citizen during his residence in Canada, returning to the United States with his family in the mid -'70s. He renounced his Canadian citizenship and in 2005 became a naturalized U.S. citizen."
Give em hell Cruz!
And give us ethanol free oil and plenty of it!
So this idiot writer for Salon admits he’s an atheist:
“It’s all enough to make one despair, and to pray to a God you don’t believe in ...”
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Just another view from the liberal left, where they don’t understand that people are fed up with their ideals.
Lol!
So perfect!
Thanks - that's good on-the-ground proof illustrating how the youth have been indoctrinated by Big Education and set up by Democratic Party policies (roadblocks to economic expansion) to run to socialism.
The condescending, elitist, haughty, and snarky reporter is a prime example of why the American press is so disposed today. I could not read past the first couple sentences.
We must be winning.
With all the petroliferous comments, not one of these lying sumbitches has the balls to come right out and make reference to Cruz as a "greaser", but they sure hint that a lot.
I believe, in any venue except the "it's okay when we do it" Left, that would be considered derogatory or even "racist".
I hadn’t scrolled down yet...I caught that, too. It’s pretty common, and the sort of ‘cute’ bullsh*t the Liberals pull when they think they are getting away with it.
The Left only sees people as commodities to exploit by dividing.
They are the racists, the haters, the bigots who want to divide and conquer by bringing out the worst prejudices and fears in everyone - plot and plan so that they’ll attack each other, while they’re consolidating power over everyone.
Do we dare elect a Cuban president?
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Cruz is not a Cuban. He was born a US citizen.
I’ve generally liked your postings for years, but stop the BS.
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