Posted on 06/17/2013 12:57:42 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Via the Examiner, a short but noteworthy clip insofar as it exposes a potential fault line between Cruz and Rand Paul. McCain lumps them together as “wacko birds” but I’m not so sure that’s true of Cruz on national-security issues. His alliance with Paul interests me because it strikes me as a personification of the uneasy libertarian/tea-party alliance. The groups overlap heavily on spending issues, and both are deeply suspicious of Obama’s expansion of government. The master stroke of Paul’s drone filibuster was that he found a sweet spot for both, making the philosophical case for due process while humiliating O for having turned into such a hypocrite about it. Even so, no matter how much Paul sometimes likes to pretend that the tea party is synonymous with libertarianism (for his own strategic reasons), various polls show that it just isn’t so. Tea partiers are more socially conservative than doctrinaire libertarians, they’re more likely to support entitlements, and they’re more traditionally Republican on defense/security issues. That’s not to say that they’re not becoming more libertarian — polls lately show Republicans are more skeptical about NSA surveillance than Democrats are, although that’s probably for partisan reasons — but they’re not all Ron Paul fans either. That’s why Rand is usually quick to claim the tea-party label. The more he gets TPers thinking of themselves as allied with him, then theoretically the more receptive they’ll be to his libertarian ideals.
McCain doesn’t seem to understand the difference between them but comparing Paul’s reaction to the NSA revelations to Cruz’s is instructive. Paul’s first instinct was to organize a class-action lawsuit and accuse the NSA of an “extraordinary invasion of [Americans'] privacy.” Cruz, by contrast, says the revelations are “cause for concern” but urges Fox viewers to reserve judgment until we know more about the programs. And from the looks of it here, his chief objection seems to be that this particular administration can’t be trusted with NSA’s surveillance tools in light of the IRS scandal, not necessarily that any administration can’t be trusted with it. He may very well end up joining Paul’s lawsuit, but I suspect that’ll be aimed at impressing libertarians whose votes he’ll need if he ends up running for president someday just as Rand often tempers his own libertarianism in order to impress more mainstream tea-party conservatives. Cruz’s ally, Sarah Palin (who returned to Fox this morning, although she doesn’t speak in this clip) seems to be taking a position similar to his lately. From her speech at the Faith and Freedom Conference on Saturday:
“The scandals infecting this city, they are a symptom of a bigger disease, and it doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat sitting atop a bloated boot on your neck, out of control government, everybody gets infected, no party is immune,” Palin said. “That’s why, I tell you, I’m listening to those independents, those libertarians, who are saying, it is both sides of the aisle, the leadership, the good ol’ boys in the party on both sides of the aisle, they perpetuate the problem.”…
Palin also took on the “pandering, rewarding the rule breakers, still-no-border security, special interest written amnesty bill,” especially ribbing Jeb Bush for his fertility comment yesterday. “I think it’s kind of touchy territory to want to debate this over one race’s fertility over another, and I say that as someone who’s kinda fertile herself.”
Obama didn’t evade Palin’s lashing, either. “Where is our commander in chief?” Palin asked. “We’re talking now more new interventions? I say, until we know what we’re doing, until we have a commander in chief who knows what he’s doing—well, chief, in these radical Islamic countries, aren’t even respecting basic human rights, when both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line ‘Allah ak-bar’—I say, let Allah sort it out.”
I suspect Cruz would agree with every word, and that her former running mate would disagree with most or all of it. (Palin advocated “Cruz control” for Washington in the speech, in fact.) She doesn’t want any more interventions under a strategist as poor as Obama — but she’s not against intervention in principle. She wants America to listen more to the libertarians, but when it comes to the lousy Gang of Eight bill, she rightly opposes it for its weak border security — even though libertarians are famously comfortable with weak borders. None of this is contradictory; most tea partiers would, I take it, agree that America needs more libertarianism while maybe not quite so much as Ron Paul supporters would prefer. The point is, though, there are real differences between Cruz and Rand Paul and I think we’re getting a hint of one in the clip. And the longer the national debate stays stuck on liberty-versus-security issues, the more obvious I think those differences will be.
There's some of that for sure. But that's just the stick and it's a result of the poisoned carrots. The on;y problem with government is that it is too big and that will correct itself eventually.
The truth certainly stands out from the lies.
LLS
It's quite possible that the Obama Admin is running some of these 'scandals' because they don't want a future admin using this against them.
this particular administration stands out to me as the problem in general, not in particular. Government is political by its very nature. Politicians and politics involve a significant degree of obfuscation and mendacity - that's not a condemnation, but a recognition of reality. Each law must be judged if it were in the worst hands, not the best.
As a Christian, I have a Savior. It's naive for conservatives to wait for one, especially a political one.
Clearly just another RINO. When can we challenge him in a primary?
Well, since we will sometimes disagree with someone on policy, we might as well pronounce everyone a RINO and be done with it.
You must not live in Texas and know nothing about his record.
Clearly the sarcasm got lost in translation.
“Ted Cruz: Let’s not rush to judgment on NSA surveillance”
My first thoughts.
“Gee. I wonder what they have on him.”
Too many Godfather movies...
Instead of being pessimistic, look at the bright side, that a lot of Americans see what’s going on, and do not like it, and they are the ones who contribute to society, instead of parasitizing from it.
Efforts at socialism always fail because socialist ideas do not pay their own way. They rely on resources outside of their system to subsidize what they do; and even worse, they continually grow until their host can no longer support them, much like a malignant cancer.
Add to this, that elitist socialism, a modern refrain of a division of society between a nobility and a peasantry, can only have any power by limiting *everything* that exists in abundance, so it can ration it to the peasantry or not. Rewarding its subjects and punishing its dissidents.
That is, *anything* in abundance can be used as an alternative currency, to defeat the ability of the elites to control others. And I mean *anything*. In East Germany, even colors other than black, gray and white were reserved to honor the state, as was music.
If the people have anything in abundance, the scheme fails.
American socialists are just as bizarre, wanting to ration everything, including water, food, nature, etc. To keep the people they despise, who they think of as peasants, living in deprivation and dependence. They even strive to ration life itself. And some, the weirdest of the lot, have decided that there are too many peasants for the elites to manage “in the world”, so wish to cull the vast majority of humanity. 90% of them, according to such lights as lizard expert Dr. Eric Pianka, and his minions.
So do not think of socialists as capable or even marginally effective at running things or empire building. Parasites and metastatic cancers cannot exist on their own. Look at the results of their handiwork in Detroit, and even the direction California is headed.
They might crave to turn America into Zimbabwe, but truth be told, without the willing assistance of their hosts, their schemes whither and die.
Blackmail? It looks to me and sounds to me like it.
Last night, Trey Gowdy sounded like he had been lobotomized. He said that Congress is powerless and has no power of prosecution. He said the public needs to pressure the white hut and DOJ to do something because congress can’t. What?
Cruz now sounding soft.
What else? Who else? The investigation(s) are falling apart. The aggression has ended. Things have become muddled and the sheeple, with the attention of a ferret, have become bored with it all.
/s is good!
Clearly some are ready to throw him under the bus..We have a history here of doing that.
“Clearly just another RINO. When can we challenge him in a primary?”
Not a commie RINO in the classical sense. A conservative
RINO. McCain and Graham are classic RINOs and the republican party hasn’t been conservative in a long time.
The problem is he thinks there is a sliver of civility in
the Obama administration. That is where he is wrong. In the
hands of this administration the NSA has become an enemy of
the people.
THIS is exactly why this story has even less legs than the IRS and Benghazi stories. Too many in the GOP are on bammy’s side on this.
I think they want to limit the world population to
500mil. Just enough workers to ply the worlds resources
and produce enough for a small group of elitist. 7bil.+
is just too many to control. The funny thing is, the know
nothing peons who support this communist movement will be
the first ones to go because they are worthless and are
not producers. Your right it never works. Leftist utopia
is a pipe dream that has never existed no matter how many
times it has been tried in the past. The only examples that
exist is it’s failures but they keep trying. It’s insanity.
I’d vote to throw Rand Paul out of office just for being a two-faced bastid!
So let me ask a question. If Cruz is a “Republican in name only” (i.e. a false or fake Republican), what current Republican do you believe is NOT a RINO?
As you state, Snowden didn't really reveal anything new, other than confirm for LIVs that fed.gov has been violating our rights for decades. (As such, then what crime(s) did he commit?)
Anyway, I'm sure various pols & pundits who wish to become better informed on the extent of this corruption would really find your primer quite useful.
It’s interesting that for some reason, socialists, and even proto-socialists who existed before the word socialist was created, have always had a “1 in 10 ratio” as part of their schemes.
Essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined that civilization should end, and that mankind would live in isolated rural villages, kept in a primitive state by itinerant “Orphic Poets”, 1 in 10 elites, who would twist and distort history and knowledge in such a way to keep them ignorant and uncivilized. And that they would reward these Orphic Poets with their substance as a reward for keeping them primitive, out of gratitude.
Ironically his idea was almost identical to that, possibly independently created by Dave Foreman of Earth First!
The pre Civil War slavery apologist George Fitzhugh, in his book ‘Cannibals All!: or, slaves without masters’, wrote that slavery was a positive social good, for which slaves are the beneficiaries, having no other concerns than to obey their masters. As such, he advocated that 9 out of every 10 people in the world be enslaved. He also wrote that the 1 out of 10 elite masters should be praised for doing the “hard work” of ruling the slaves and keeping them enslaved.
And finally, lizard expert Dr. Eric R. Pianka, in his infamous speech before the Texas Academy of Science, proposed an airborne ebola virus to wipe out 90% of humanity as a good thing. All but two of his fellow “scientists” and graduate students gave him wild applause for this notion. People who might very well be able to bring his insane notion to reality through genetic engineering.
Of the other two, one informed the FBI, and the other agreed with the first that this was what Pianka had said. For his part, Pianka tap-danced and said that he was just talking in theory, not advocating, a blatant lie.
But always with this 1 in 10 idea. Nobility and peasantry.
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