Oh, and EYE BLEACH!
Posted on 04/08/2016 11:04:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Cruz's odds of winning the nomination are steadily increasing, and we should bey very, very afraid
On the occasion of longshot presidential candidate Ted Cruz’s campaign launch back in March, The Onion published a satirical piece about subscribers to TIME magazine bracing themselves for the awful, “inevitable” day when they would open their mailboxes to find themselves staring at a picture of Cruz on the cover under a headline like “The Game Changer” or “The Firebrand.” It was an absurd joke that went so meta that this week when TIME actually put Cruz on the cover, they also ran a story about The Onion’s piece from a year ago. Our politics have become very, very surreal.
TIME’s cover story is headlined, “Likable Enough?,” accompanied by a fetching portrait of Cruz with a mischievous look on his face and a lovely ice blue tie. He looks exceedingly likable and once you read the stories within, you’ll have to conclude that the man whom virtually everyone with the misfortune of knowing him finds repulsive is terribly misunderstood. Where you might have thought the man was a doctrinaire rightwinger, steeped in religious fanaticism and radical free market extremism, you will find out that he’s actually a good old boy, a salt of the earth populist. (One hopes for his sake that nobody leaves a copy lying around on the yachts of some of the billionaires who’ve been writing ten million dollar checks on his behalf. It could get awkward.)
In an interview entitled “Ted Cruz Embraces Economic Populism,” a very slick Cruz says:
[B]oth parties, career politicians in both parties get in bed with the lobbyist and special interest. And the fix is in. Where Washington’s policies benefit big business, benefit the rich and the powerful at the expense of the working men and women.
Now the point that I often make, and just a couple of days ago in Wisconsin I was visiting with a young woman who said she was a Bernie Sanders supporter. And I mentioned to her that I agreed with Bernie on the problem.
But I said if you think the problem is Washington is corrupt, why would you want Washington to have more power? I think the answer to that problem is for Washington to have less power, for government to have less power over our lives.
This has always been the American right’s clever little take on “populism.” Sure, sure, folks, those rich guys and big business are bad, very bad. But it’s all because they’re bribing politicians to give them what they want. The best thing to do is slash taxes, reverse all regulations and get rid of consumer protections so they won’t need to bribe politicians because they’ll have everything they want! Then the power of the markets will be unleashed and you can be rich too!
Throughout the interview, this wily Ivy League educated lawyer presents himself as the champion of the working class, the guy whose only concerns lie with the single mom who works as a waitress and the dad who lost his job down to the plant and can’t get ahead. But in reality his record on economics is one that only a Koch Brother could love. And even they can’t stand him.
Still he’s presented as some sort of iconoclast who defies the usual right-wing classification because he opposes the Import-Export Bank and ethanol subsidies, both of which are obscure little libertarian totems that will have exactly zero effect on the lives of those waitress moms and unemployed dads for whom he purports to care so much. Most of his economic agenda will actually devastate them and everyone they know.
For instance, he’s one of the few Republicans to actually believe that the U.S. should return to the gold standard. This is a fringe position held by acolytes of Rand Paul and Glenn Beck, which the Washington Post WonkBlog noted is held by virtually no experts anywhere. The Post quotes University of Chicago professor Anil Kashyap saying that “love of the gold standard implies macroeconomic illiteracy.” (And needless to say, calling a goldbug a populist is to take a hallucinogenic trip down the yellow brick road, if you know what I mean.)
Cruz is not just a run-of-the-mill deficit hawk — he is for a balanced budget amendment combined with monumental tax cuts (and the total abolition of the IRS) which would require disastrous cuts to thousands of vital programs. Everyone knows he favors repealing the Affordable Care Act; he led the quixotic rightwing hostage taking effort to shut down the government and default on the debt in order to make that happen. It doesn’t take much to imagine the chaos and pain that would ensue as tens of millions of waitress moms and unemployed dads lose their insurance.
He plans to completely deregulate Wall Street and has been endorsed by the Club for Growth, which describes its mission as “cutting taxes, controlling federal spending, personal accounts for Social Security, ending the death tax, eliminating the capital gains tax, fundamental tax reform, providing true school choice and minimizing government’s role in our daily lives.” Every one of those goals are designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the average citizen.
Those are just some of his economic policies, all of which are as conservative as it gets. For all we know, he may even believe his own hype — conservatives have been selling trickle down as a great boon to the middle and working class for decades. It’s possible that he just hasn’t noticed that all of this hocus pocus has been tried and has failed miserably to benefit anyone but the 1 percent. But Cruz is a very cunning politician and the smooth way he uses populist-style rhetoric to sell a plutocratic agenda makes it likely he knows exactly what he’s doing.
Ted Cruz saying he’s fighting the elites on behalf of the working man sounds very nice. But let’s just say that the big money boys won’t be disappointed if his agenda is enacted. Indeed, they’ll be ecstatic. And surely the media must know this. Calling him a “populist” because he trash talks Washington just like Bernie Sanders shows just how eagerly the press allows themselves to be gulled into a sexy story line. And this one looks distressingly like something we might see cooked up in Grover Norquist’s basement: The “everyman” populist Cruz, slayer of RINOs, vs. the ancient establishment drudge Hillary Clinton, defender of the corrupt Washington cartel. And that’s ridiculous. Ted Cruz is so deeply wedded to laissez faire, free market ideology that he makes any Democrat, whether Clinton, Sanders or even Joe Lieberman look like William Jennings Bryan by comparison.
All presidential finalists get an opportunity to be looked at with fresh eyes by the press when it starts to look as if they have a serious chance. But it behooves the media not to get carried away into total fantasy in order to set up a preferred story line. Ted Cruz is a very smart guy and has been underrated throughout this campaign. But ultra conservative Republicans aren’t voting for him because of his winning personality or “populist” economics. They’re voting for him because he a far right fanatic just like they are. Just because he isn’t Donald Trump it doesn’t mean he isn’t also a demagogue. He’s just a different kind.
Yes Cruz is such a threat to Gays, All the way to the bank.
Cruz Mega-Donor is Gay, Pro-Pot Billionaire
https://www.texastribune.org/2012/07/03/ted-cruzs-gay-billionaire-donor-draws-criticism/
“Senator Ted Cruz has positioned himself as a strong opponent of same-sex marriage, urging pastors nationwide to preach in support of marriage as an institution between a man and a woman, which he said was “ordained by God.”
But on Monday night, at a reception for him at the Manhattan apartment of two prominent gay hoteliers, the Texas senator and Republican presidential hopeful struck quite a different tone.
During the gathering, according to two people present, Mr. Cruz said he would not love his daughters any differently if one of them was gay.”
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/23/1379823/-Ted-Cruz-courts-gay-donors-yes-you-read-that-right
Many more
From Salon.....lol Trumpsters are showing their true colors. True lefties with New York values.
Robert Reich: Why Cruz is more dangerous than Trump
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W5e7AwqksU
Horrors!
For the possessive, both Cruz’ and Cruz’s are equally correct.
Why November? He will be back in the senate by then.
Ted Cruz, the establishment candidate. Who would have thunk that.
Oh, and EYE BLEACH!
And you’ll be back at Daily Kos?
Agreed. When the Salon types are this petrified of a Republican candidate, you know he’s on the right track!
I’ve been checking for replies to the “globalist” comments and it seems to me no one is listening because it has already been disputed.
Keep saying it though because it was Goebbels who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/goebbelslie.html
Cruz is leading a much expected 'revival' in some religious circles. A global revival is all the better. What ever it takes... Logic is lost in the anticipation...
Ted Cruz is not a constitutional-conservative. Were Cruz really a constitutional-conservativehe would not be running for president. There is no way in he[[ that the son of a Cuban born in Canada is a natural born citizen of the United States under original intent.
There is no way a constitutional-conservative would have voted for the Corker amendment.
There is no way a constitutional-conservative would have voted to reauthorize the Patriot Act.
There is no way a constitutional-conservative would have voted for the TPP enabling TPA.
Ted Cruz is also a liar, conservatives used to not like lairs.
Ok. :-)
“He plans to completely deregulate Wall Street and has been endorsed by the Club for Growth,”
Oh this won’t be a problem in the general at all..../s
Welcome Madam President!
A Godly man bares the fruit of the righteous - he is not so habitually dishonest his peers call him a liar. Nor does he plays dirty and underhanded even when the opportunity is handed to him. Also, he would be charitable and not regularly get closer than arms length in his dealings with the Wicked.
Matthew 7:15-18 tells us.
15”Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16”You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? 17”So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.
NAFTA, TPP, TSA, Corker Bill, What he did to Carson, siding with the BLM protestors against cops, etc. Those and many other acts are not the fruit of a Godly man, they are the fruit of False Prophet who does not tithe.
There is no rebuttal to the Globalist label for Cruz because its factual history. Attacking me with an Alinsky tactic will not erase Cruz’s Globalist actions involving NAFTA, TPP, TSA, Corker Bill, Gutting our ability to police currency manipulation, Closure votes on TPP, trying to increase H1B visa by 500 percent while doubling the number of Syrian Muslims we take in etc.
But, when you cannot rebut facts, all you got left is what you tried and failed at.
NAFTA:
The impetus for NAFTA actually began with President Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on a North American common market. In 1984, Congress passed the Trade and Tariff Act. This is important because it gave the President “fast-track” authority to negotiate free trade agreements, while only allowing Congress the ability to approve or disapprove, not change negotiating points. Canadian Prime Minister Mulroney agreed with Reagan to begin negotiations for the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which was signed in 1988, went into effect in 1989 and is now suspended since it’s no longer neeeded. (Source: NaFina, NAFTA Timeline)
http://useconomy.about.com/od/tradepolicy/p/NAFTA_History.htm
Normally when conservative politicians make dog-whistle appeals to their base, they do so in right-wing publications. They do an interview with World Net Daily or Breitbart or call in for a radio hit with Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin to get their message across.
However, the genius of Ted Cruz is that he launched a 10,000-word broadside, replete with 181 footnotes, against the scale and scope of the modern federal government this week in a publication considered by many to be the bastion of liberal elitism—the Harvard Law Review. In the article, one can see within the tight legal argument appeals to those on the far right concerned about Agenda 21, NAFTA superhighways, or any of a range of other conspiracy theories, yet all buried within the tight legal argument and presented in a high-minded way that passes muster in Cambridge, Mass.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ted-cruz-harvard-law-manifesto-031910511—politics.html
Ted Cruz’s Harvard Law Manifesto
[The Daily Beast]
Ben Jacobs
January 10, 2014
GET YOUR FREE COPY HERE!
https://www.hslda.org/landingpages/crpd/docs/Cruz_Limits_on_the_Treaty_Power.pdf
Hey Establishment troll, Cruz helped draft it for Bush. So plaster all the disinformation from your manufactured authorities you want Hes a globalist and nothing you say or do can make that FACT go away.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXcYCwaBKnQ&app=desktop
pop goes the Corker...the Iran deal that only obama signed, eh? Not the komayni?
“Cruz, Corker clash on Senate floor”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2013/09/26/corker-cruz-clash-on-senate-floor/
Senator Ted Cruz Is Right: the Corker Law Period for Congressional Review of the Iran Act Has Never Begun
I have to assume that these opponents of the deal, whose good faith I do not question, are unfamiliar with the Corker law and thus do not understand what Cruz is trying to do, namely, preserve the anti-nuclear sanctions against Iran that will be repealed if the vote for which they are stamping their feet goes forward. As I explained in my weekend column, the Corker law (the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015) required President Obama to submit the entirety of the Iran deal, including all side deals within five days of closing the deal – meaning, by July 19. It is indisputable that Obama has failed to comply with this requirement.
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