Week of 05/02/2016

My Problem With... Ted Cruz
– by David Matthews 2

(Note: This is the continuation of the ongoing look at the candidates that make up the 2016 Farce.  Each of the five “dominant” candidates will be examined.  The author will not entertain nor permit anyone to try to negate the focus of each candidate by saying “X is bad but Y is even worse” because they all are bad in their own way.  Each will have their turn to be examined and castigated, and you probably will not like it when it is your candidate’s turn.)

I have a problem with Texas Senator and Presidential Wannabe Ted Cruz.

Actually I have several problems with him, and when I started working on this whole “My Problem With” series, I seriously wondered who my first focus would be on; when, really, I should have just accepted that this is the first person.

Let’s start with the basics: Ted Cruz was not born in the United States.  He was born in Canada.  This is in direct violation of the United States Constitution, which says that only a “natural-born citizen” can be President of the United States.  (Article II, Section 1, go ahead and read up on it.)  And keep in mind that we spent the past eight years questioning and challenging the legal status of President Barack Obama for just that very reason.

Unfortunately for us, Ted Cruz is supposedly a lawyer, and shysters always have friends in high places that manage to find ways to weasel around pesky little things like that.  So it should come to no surprise that his friends in the Harvard Law School penned a little legal article declaring Cruz to be “natural-born citizen” because his mommy was an American.  (Never mind that they refused to recognize that very argument concerning Obama.)  And then they pulled out a little-known 1790 law that declared anyone born of an American mommy makes them a “natural-born citizen”.  (Again, where was this when they went after Obama?)  And it also helps that his friends in the legal system managed to thwart all legal challenges on his qualifications by using that legal brief from his friends in the Harvard Law School and that all-too-convenient law, which somehow did not exist when they were going after Obama, even though Obama was actually born in the United States, and Cruz clearly was not.

But this is just the tip of the problem iceberg with him.

Cruz has gotten this far in the 2016 Farce mostly because of three things. 

First, he has the evangelical and Dominionist crowds in his back pocket.  His father is an evangelical minster and he’s been hitting up the faithful like Harold Hill in “The Music Man”.  I may have been wary of George W. Bush simply because the evangelicals were supporting him, but not like they are with Cruz.  The evangelicals have actually anointed Cruz as “God’s Chosen Candidate”, and he has even gone so far as to proclaim it himself in the New York Primary!  This is the Christian version of the Ayatollah Khomeini, folks, and I would hope you all would be a little nervous about that!  This is the unnamed President played by Cliff Robertson in “Escape from L.A.” minus the colossal earthquake and without Snake Plissken to stop him. 

Second, Cruz has managed to convince a lot of people that he is the only alternative to Donald Trump.  There are a lot of people that simply do not want Trump to be the GOP nominee, never mind the next President of the United States.  I’ll go into why that is when I get to my problems with Trump, but, sufficient to say, Cruz is somehow convincing voting idiots that a Canadian-born Christian Khomeini is better than an American-born Mussolini.  Even though people don’t like Cruz, that they may fear what he could do to America, they have still convinced themselves that Trump is somehow worse.  The truth is, neither of them are better than the other.  They’re equally horrible candidates.  But, like I said, this is about Cruz, not Trump.

And third, Cruz knows how the rules work behind the scenes and he’s been able to manipulate them to his advantage.  He knows that the real power in the GOP nomination process is not with the voters, but with delegates.  So even if he doesn’t have the popular vote, he’s been able to weasel his way into getting what he really wants, which are the delegates.

Doesn’t seem fair, does it?  I mean, you’re led to believe that you somehow have a say in who the nominee will be for the November Elections, and you are encouraged to vote for the person that you think should be that nominee, and then you find out that even though the vast majority of people vote for one candidate, the political system actually gives the delegates to someone else.  Makes you wonder why you should even bother with it, right?

And that brings me to one of the biggest problems I have with Ted Cruz... he doesn’t seem to have a problem with cheating to get what he wants!

We actually saw this with the Iowa Caucus.  On the day of the Caucus, the Cruz camp started circulating a rumor that Dr. Ben Carson was stepping down and that his voters should vote for Cruz instead.  It wasn’t true, but any support Carson may have had for that very first caucus of the 2016 Farce went to Cruz instead.  They also were using intimidating messages to get voters to vote, which Cruz had no remorse about.  He even boasted that he’d use any tactic necessary to get people to vote.

There’s your “Christian” candidate, people!  “God’s Anointed Candidate”!  A liar and a cheater and a swindler.  The man that out-and-out violated three of the Ten Commandments in just one caucus!  (For the home players, that’s stealing, bearing false witness, and coveting.)

In fact, this is why I try to use the hashtag #Cheat2Win whenever Cruz’s name is mentioned.  Trump likes to refer to Cruz as “Lyin’ Ted”, given that Cruz has “TrusTed” as his campaign slogan.  Trump isn’t wrong with his assessment, but to simply think of Cruz as a liar is like saying a flood is just “a little moisture”.

And then there is Cruz’s recent announcement... that he would chose former Presidential wannabe Carly Fiorina to be his running mate.  Bear in mind that he is so far behind in delegates (as of this article’s posting) that the only way that he could win outright would be to siphon off every delegate from John Kasich and Marco Rubio and sweep every remaining state primary and caucus.  But he is so certain that he can manipulate and swindle the nomination right out from under Trump that he is actually picking his running mate now rather than before the convention.

And what a “winner” that choice for second-slot is!  A wannabe that saw videos that never existed, and had no qualms “borrowing” children to be used as political props without getting the permission from the parents beforehand!  Can you imagine what kind of Veep she would be?

Let’s get brutally honest here... Ted Cruz is the worst kind of political figure.  He is slimy, weasel-faced, manipulative, pompous, self-serving, arrogant, and he has shown that he will do and say anything to get what he wants with no regard to the consequences.  I know some people will retort with “well, Duh, that’s what all politicians are”, but Cruz is so good at being the worst kind of political figure that he actually gives slimy manipulative political figures a bad name!

Cruz is not liked even among his own peers.  Remember when he did his self-serving filibuster on the floor of the Senate in his vain attempt to “stop Obamacare”?  He didn’t make any friends doing that.  Even hardened political hacks were looking at that like other parents would look at a child throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of a store.  They were all saying “we’ll let him get it out of his system and then we’ll go back to doing next-to-nothing.”  Did he succeed?  No.  He simply “declared victory” and stepped down.

Of course, since he isn’t liked by his own peers in Washington, that supposedly qualifies him to be an “outsider” in politics.  It’s like saying you’re “skinny” when you still weigh over 500 pounds simply because you drink diet sodas.

Former Speaker of the House, John Boehner, recently described Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh”, and said, quote, “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”  When John Boehner, the frumpy spray-tanning chain-smoking career politician and walking expression of misery, calls you a “miserable son of a bitch”, then you are just that, period.

Here’s the clincher, folks: Cruz is so un-liked by a lot of people, he could very well drive voters right to the Democrats in November.  They see the danger that Cruz poses for America, and that could just be enough to hand everything over to whomever would be the Democratic nominee, even if that nominee is Hillary Clinton, the one person they have a problem with.

I wish I could say with any certainty that Cruz would not succeed.  That somehow the voters and the party bosses and party manipulators would see the threat that Cruz poses and deny him any possible chance of a nomination.  But this is Ted Cruz we’re talking about, and if there is any possible chance that he can weasel and worm his way to get what he wants, then he’ll do it.  And he knows that he has the support of a whole segment of the voting populace suffering from a social form of bunker mentality and firmly believe that he chosen by God to be their redeemer.  That, in and of itself, is a pretty dangerous combination, and one that the GOP leaders and bosses and party players need to take notice of.  If they don’t, then we will all pay the price for it.