I’ve been watching this clown with interest ever since he ended up being one of our two wackaloon senators from Texas. Cruz has a big problem in the Lone Star State. It’s one of the last hold outs of the dying Teaparty, and a bunch of those crazy mother fuckers hate Hispanics. They just despise them, for no reason other than pure, evil, xenophobic racism. A guy with the last name of Cruz gets a shot with that bunch for two reasons only: first he helps put a thin veneer of non racism on an overtly racist sub party, and two, he has to be or at least act like he is snake venom spitting crazy. It seems Cruz has chosen to serve that last goal by playing Joe McCarthy:
New Yorker — Last week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s prosecutorial style of questioning Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, came so close to innuendo that it raised eyebrows in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Cruz’s inquiry into Hagel’s past associations “out of bounds, quite frankly.” The Times reported that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, rebuked Cruz for insinuating, without evidence, that Hagel may have collected speaking fees from North Korea. Some Democrats went so far as to liken Cruz, who is a newcomer to the Senate, to a darkly divisive predecessor, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusades devolved into infamous witch hunts. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, stopped short of invoking McCarthy’s name, but there was no mistaking her allusion when she talked about being reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.”
Boxer’s analogy may have been more apt than she realized. Two and a half years ago, Cruz gave a stem-winder of a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally in Austin, Texas, in which he accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there. Cruz attended Harvard Law School from 1992 until 1995. His spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request to discuss the speech.
Cruz has a bigger problem now: like another cartoon figure named Homer Simpson once found out, what plays in Springfeld doesn’t always fly in Capital City. Cruz is revealed here as a sociopathic fraud (Or he is possibly pathologically insane, which most reporters doubt), he’s seen now as a flim-flam artist of the most transparent sort. He can’t back down without breaking his unholy covenant with the losers that put him in power, but if he keeps it up he risks becoming a full on radioactive laughingstock within his own caucus.
His best bet, indeed his only real course, is to just stop and hope it blows over without any base blowback. Because right now, as of this morning anyway, even the local papers in Texas are turning against him, brutally, like a rabid dog. And If this ends up blowing up in his face, Mr Cruz will have deserved every last piece of painful shrapnel.
Stephen,
I read the online version of the San Antonio Express News. I like to keep up with news there since we will unfortunately soon be moving back there.
Take a look at the letters to the editor section sometime. In the comments section you will find some die-hard tea party faithful who fully support Cruz and think that he is doing exactly what he was elected to do. The right wingnuts there are very, very scary.
On Friday Rachel Maddow did a great segment on just this topic. The similarities to McCarthy are incredible.
The historical problem: the denigration of McCarthy is not universal. A very significant portion of the TeaPartiers think of him as some kind of prophet and martyr.
McCarthyism was ugly and scary, but I understand why it worked. The USSR had the bomb, the bomb was new, it was even more terrifying then than it is now, and they were a credible nuclear threat. I can understand the hysteria and why brandishing it worked so well for Mr McCarthy. But I don’t get why it would work so well these days. At least outside of the circle of the usual suspects. In fact I don’t think it is working so well, I think Mr Cruz has made a critical error. He has plenty of time to recover from it before facing election again, but he fouled up, and I think he knows he fouled up.
Jim Inhofe must be glad. Someone crazier and dumber
As I posted on the AAS’s Facebook page, I’ve heard that 16 of Cruz’s Washington staffers conduct satanic rituals in the cloak room after hours, and I think he owes the American people an explanation. I’m not saying his staffers do conduct horrible rituals involving babies and live goats, but the questions remain.
The GOP has made a regular habit of trying rehabilitate/reframe/re-contextualize the villains associated with their brand. There were several papers and opinion pieces printed that attempted to reframe the Red Scare as an attack by communists that was deftly blocked by Ronald Reagan and McCarthy. These came complete with fake quotes from communist leaders complimenting the effectiveness of their anti-communist efforts.
Reagan was presented as a masterful operator and staunch defended of liberty and McCarthy as an honest and forthright man who paid a high price for his patriotism. Presumably the communists assassinated his character by planting lies and making him look the fool as retaliation for his successful defense of the nation.
Look under a few rocks online and you should be able to find some version or tracks of this line of revisionist history. Visit the darker end of the internet forums, where fervent belief in Nazi moon bases and Chemtrails isn’t disqualifying, and troll a line about how you never knew the communists were ‘that close to taking over the US in the 50s’ and, if you are patient, someone will reference the story about how McCarthy and Reagan were heroes. As strange as it may seem the revisionist history is out there, living under a rock, but otherwise alive and well.
I suspect that posted on the cork board in most right-wing think tanks is a list of topics and propaganda to push when they momentarily run out of liberals to smear and current candidates to resurface after a major gaff. The line about Reagan being a hero is GOP boiler plate and at the top. Using Reagan to help rehabilitate Tailgunner Joe is second in line. Under that is the story about how it was Republicans who were the real friends to the black man and how they actively pushed for civil rights. Lincoln being a Republican is their starting point and ‘welfare keeps the black man down’ often the end. There is even a story where JFK shouldn’t get credit for going to the moon because one of Eisenhower’s advisers had listed going to the moon as an option so the whole idea is Republican.
There is sure to be a Teaparty hard core that considers being compared to McCarthy a compliment. An artful rewriting of history tends to make heroes out of villains and villains out of heroes. Lies paid for in large part with taxpayer money because think tanks are both tax deductible and non-profit.