The picture NY Times in-house conservative, David Brooks, conjured up of Ted Cruz is truly ugly. It's hard to imagine anyone reading it and accepting Brooks' reporting and then ever vote for Cruz for anything, let along president. What a horrible, horrible person, the antithesis of all of the teachings of Jesus rolled up into one sad, desperate little man, driven crazy by a psychotic father and with an innate need to dominate others. His old college roommate warned us Cruz was already a monster back in the 1980s. The word that came up most frequently when his former classmates were asked to describe him was "creepy." Brooks goes beyond creepy into brutalism. "Ted Cruz," he wrote, "is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace.
Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.Cruz lays down an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear. America is heading off “the cliff to oblivion.” After one Democratic debate he said, “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”...Cruz manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion, for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse Obama’s executive orders, make the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord....The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind.Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism-- when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.
What stands in Cruz's way right now-- what will keep him out of the White House-- is Herr Trumpf, who has basically hissed into the ear of every voter in Iowa that Cruz is not qualified to be president because he is not a natural born American citizen. Cruz, who was born in Canada, only recently renounced his Canadian citizenship. Cruz claims-- although many constitutional scholars disagree with him-- that he qualifies because one of his parents, his mother, was a U.S. citizen. His father was a vicious and outspoken America-hater and the claims about his mother are suspect, since her name is on Canadian voter rolls, meaning she, like her husband and son, was a Canadian citizen. It is certainly not a settled matter and Cruz's once solid support in Iowa is rapidly crumbling.His desperate campaign has been running push polls against Trumpf. Cruz is using several lines of attack. One is that Trump’s recent comments to a Christian audience in Iowa that he has "never asked God for forgiveness" and another just blatantly decries Herr as "a New York liberal pretending to have conservative values." Cruz is already using the New York theme at his rallies. He told a radio show host that Trump should use "New York, New York" as his campaign theme song because he "embodies New York values." Other lines of attack against Trumpf involved his contributions to Democratic candidates, his support for abortion and his embrace of the dreaded "single-payer healthcare," all topics meant to make brainwashed GOP blood boil. A brand new survey from PPP of Iowa Republicans shows that the "birther" issue is already becoming a problem for Cruz.
Only 32% of Iowa Republicans think someone born in another country should be allowed to serve as President, to 47% who think such a person shouldn't be allowed to serve as President. Among that segment of the Republican electorate who don't think someone foreign born should be able to be President, Trump is crushing Cruz 40/14.Despite all the attention to this issue in the last week, still only 46% of Iowa Republicans are aware that Cruz was not born in the United States. In fact, there are more GOP voters in the state who think Cruz (34%) was born in the United States than think Barack Obama (28%) was. Donald Trump knows what he's doing when he repeatedly brings up this issue-- 36% of Cruz voters aren't aware yet that he wasn't born in the United States, and 24% of Cruz voters say someone born outside the country shouldn't be allowed to be President. So this issue has the potential to be a difference maker with the race persistently so close in Iowa.
And this evening it came out that-- speaking of New York values-- Cruz's storied Senate campaign-- something he's been lying about for years-- was financed by a 'til now undisclosed, low interest loan from New York, New York banksters Goldman Sachs (and another from Citibank)-- around a million dollars worth.
Neither loan appears in reports the Ted Cruz for Senate Committee filed with the Federal Election Commission, in which candidates are required to disclose the source of money they borrow to finance their campaigns. Other campaigns have been investigated and fined for failing to make such disclosures, which are intended to inform voters and prevent candidates from receiving special treatment from lenders.
Cruz is now claiming, "oops, someone forgot to report it," but he certainly didn't forget whose interests to vote for in the Senate where he always took the side of the banksters against his own Texas constituents, despite playing a populist on TV. Hypocritically, he's denounced Goldman Sachs-- "Like many other players on Wall Street and big business, they seek out and get special favors from government"-- while voting consistently to give them special favors from the government. The tax plan he's running on today couldn't be more favorable to the banksters if they wrote it themselves. So far this cycle, the only senator the Financial Sector has given more money to than Cruz is their indentured servant, Chuck Schumer. Cruz has taken in $1,795,845. Career long, the banksters have given him $4,134,237. This is what Bernie talks about when he points out how so many politicians are for sale.
