The Implosion of Ted Cruz

I find the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency to be frightening.  That said, Ted Cruz in the White House is just as frightening given his loathsomeness and bigotry - and willingness to utterly prostitute himself to the Christofascists in the GOP base as underscored by his ongoing anti-transgender lies.  In deed, Lindsey Graham described the choice between Trump and Cruz as akin to deciding whether to be killed by a gunshot or poisoning.  Now, with Indiana voters going to the polls today, it appears that Cruz has begun to implode.  A column in the Washington Post looks at "Lucifer's" decline.  Here are excerpts:

In a case of exceptionally bad timing, Fiorina hitched herself to Cruz at precisely the moment his candidacy began to implode, as polls showed him fading in must-win Indiana before Tuesday’s vote. Fiorina’s previous criticism of Cruz and her checkered record at HP were again in the news.

It’s not Fiorina’s fault that news broke just after her “nomination” was announced that former House speaker John Boehner, still a popular figure in nearby Ohio, had called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh” and a “miserable son of a bitch.” Nor was it Fiorina’s fault that Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Friday gave Cruz such a tepid endorsement — he said that he “will be voting for Ted Cruz” but that “I particularly want to commend Donald Trump” — that Pence attempted a do-over in the form of an op-ed in the Indianapolis Star.

But if Fiorina picked investments the way she picked her candidate, you can see why HP stopped requiring her services. She bought Cruz at the peak, when polls showed him close in Indiana. But an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll Sunday found Trump up 15 points.

And now Cruz and Fiorina have to explain all those things she used to say about him: that “Cruz is just like any other politician”; that “there’s no honor in charging a hill that you know you can’t take, only casualties, although Ted Cruz maybe got name recognition and money”; and that it was “odd that Senator Ted Cruz did not renounce his dual Canadian citizenship until 2014.”

Cruz now also has to defend Fiorina’s record at HP, where she let go thousands and sent jobs to India and China. “Will the Cruz-Fiorina team do the same thing to Indiana that she did to Hewlett-Packard?” Fox News’s Chris Wallace asked Cruz on Sunday.

Fiorina was not standing at his shoulder later Monday, when he waded bravely into a group of Trump supporters outside his event. Cruz bravely tried to engage them in calm discussion. “Donald Trump is deceiving you. He is playing you for a chump,” Cruz said.

The Trump supporters taunted Cruz: “Do the math. . . . Time to drop out. . . . You are the problem, politician. . . . Where’s your Goldman Sachs jacket? . . . Lyin’ like you always do. . . . Are you Canadian?” America, one said, would be a better country “without you.”

If Cruz hadn’t established himself as a singularly unlikable candidate, one could almost have felt sorry for him in that moment. He needed urgently for Fiorina to sing more Ethel Merman . . . 

GOP Dismiss Own Responsibility for Anti-Abortion Extremism; Cruz: Shooter Was a "Transgender Leftist Activist"

Carly Fiorina - who has made the worse false statements against Planned Parenthood

Overheated rhetoric and fabricated and false "facts" - outright lies might be an more apt description - often set the stage for violent acts.   And no one disseminates more deliberate lies and falsehoods than the "godly Christian" crowd be it about Planned Parenthood or LGBT citizens.  Yet when violence results from such efforts these same hate merchants feign shock, surprise and denial over their own the consequences of their handiwork.  The same holds true to political whores within the Republican Party, who parrot the same lies and dangerous rhetoric as they prostitute themselves to the ugliest elements of the party base.  An example of this phenomenon was on display as a number of the GOP presidential candidates condemned the murders at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility out of one side of their mouths even as they dismissed any responsibility for repeating false and inflammatory religious extremist propaganda.  The Washington Post looks at this disgusting behavior as does Think Progress.  Here are highlights from the Post:

Several Republican presidential candidates on Sunday condemned the attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs but stopped short of agreeing with liberal critics who say that fiery antiabortion rhetoric contributed to the shooting.

“It’s obviously a tragedy. Nothing justifies this,” former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Any protesters should always be peaceful. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter or pro-life protesters.”

Calls to defund Planned Parenthood through congressional action have escalated in recent months amid a protracted national debate about the ethics of collecting fetal tissue for research.

That dialogue was cast in a grim light after reports that the suspected Colorado gunman is said to have used the phrase “no more baby parts’’ while discussing his motives for the attack, as reported by The Washington Post on Saturday. Liberal critics of antiabortion activism have linked escalating rhetoric on the right with Friday’s attack, including Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains.

“We’ve seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months,” Cowart said in a statement. “That environment breeds acts of violence.”

Fiorina took a particularly hard line against Planned Parenthood during the second Republican presidential debate, held in September. In one instance, she described “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

That characterization struck an emotional chord with voters but was ultimately proven to be an inaccurate representation. Though no video showing what she described was found to exist, Fiorina has held that her depiction was accurate.

Carson did not directly address antiabortion rhetoric but did warn of increasing political divisions in the country.    “If we can get rid of the rhetoric from either side and actually talk about the facts, I think that's when we begin to make progress,” he said. “And, you know, a lot of people, when they don't have facts, when they don't have a good backup, that's when the rhetoric starts.

Ben Carson's remark about facts is ridiculous since he is the one with no facts to back up his batshitery.  The most dis gusting of all, however is Ted Cruz who described Planned Parenthood shooter as  a "transgendered leftist activist."   Here are excerpts from Think Progress:

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is the latest presidential candidate trying to downplay the role anti-abortion rhetoric may have played in motivating the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado Springs Friday afternoon. When a reporter asked him at an Iowa campaign stop Sunday evening about suspect Robert Lewis Dear saying he was motivated by “no more baby parts,” Cruz countered that he’s also been reported to be a “transgendered [sic] leftist activist.”

Cruz explained, “We know that he was a man registered to vote as a woman.” This discrepancy on Dear’s voter registration was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, a self-described “right-of-center news website,” under the claim that he “identifies as [a] woman.” Conservatives have since run with the claim that Dear is transgender.

There is actually no evidence to suggest that he is transgender, nor a “leftist,” nor any kind of activist. In fact, all of the available information suggests he was none of those things.

But since before the shooting was even resolved on Friday, conservatives have been clinging to such discrepancies in an attempt to suggest that it had little to do with the issue of abortion. When a witness called MSNBC Friday afternoon and indicated that the shooting had come from the direction of the Chase bank, a building that was between her location and the Planned Parenthood, conservatives invented an entirely new narrative claiming that the incident was a bank robbery gone wrong and that the shooter had simply hidden in the Planned Parenthood when he was unable to get away. Colorado Springs police debunked this story before the situation was over, clarifying that he had not entered any other buildings at any point.

Dear’s reference to “baby parts” clearly refers to deceptively edited videos suggesting that Planned Parenthood was selling parts of aborted fetuses for a profit. The claims were quickly debunked; in fact, the cut footage from one of the surreptitiously recorded videos even shows the targeted doctor saying, “Nobody should be ‘selling’ tissue. That’s just not the goal here.” The myth, nevertheless, has persisted.

 

Fantasies and Fictions at G.O.P. Debate

In an op-ed in the New York Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman adds to the slaps downs being give to the Republican Party and its would be nominees in the wake of the GOP presidential debate on Wednesday evening.  As noted in an earlier post yesterday, the Republican Party is increasingly un-tethered from reality and now is most focused on restating talking points that will win points with the racist, homophobic, misogynist base of the party or adhere to an fantastical ideology that wants to recreate a version of the 1950's that never existed except perhaps for the privileged positions held by whites.  Here are column highlights:

I’ve been going over what was said at Wednesday’s Republican debate, and I’m terrified. You should be, too. After all, given the vagaries of elections, there’s a pretty good chance that one of these people will end up in the White House.

Why is that scary? I would argue that all of the G.O.P. candidates are calling for policies that would be deeply destructive at home, abroad, or both. But even if you like the broad thrust of modern Republican policies, it should worry you that the men and woman on that stage are clearly living in a world of fantasies and fictions. And some seem willing to advance their ambitions with outright lies.

You’re probably tired of hearing this, but modern G.O.P. economic discourse is completely dominated by an economic doctrine — the sovereign importance of low taxes on the rich — that has failed completely and utterly in practice over the past generation.

Think about it. Bill Clinton’s tax hike was followed by a huge economic boom, the George W. Bush tax cuts by a weak recovery that ended in financial collapse. The tax increase of 2013 and the coming of Obamacare in 2014 were associated with the best job growth since the 1990s. Jerry Brown’s tax-raising, environmentally conscious California is growing fast; Sam Brownback’s tax- and spending-slashing Kansas isn’t.

Yet the hold of this failed dogma on Republican politics is stronger than ever, with no skeptics allowed. . . . . The only candidate talking sense about economics was, yes, Donald Trump, who declared that “we’ve had a graduated tax system for many years, so it’s not a socialistic thing.”

If the discussion of economics was alarming, the discussion of foreign policy was practically demented.

Indeed, the only candidate who seemed remotely sensible on national security issues was Rand Paul, which is almost as disturbing as the spectacle of Mr. Trump being the only voice of economic reason.

The real revelation on Wednesday, however, was the way some of the candidates went beyond expounding bad analysis and peddling bad history to making outright false assertions, and probably doing so knowingly, which turns those false assertions into what are technically known as “lies.”

Mr. Christie’s mendacity pales, however, in comparison to that of Carly Fiorina, who was widely hailed as the “winner” of the debate.

Some of Mrs. Fiorina’s fibs involved repeating thoroughly debunked claims about her business record. No, she didn’t preside over huge revenue growth. She made Hewlett-Packard bigger by acquiring other companies, mainly Compaq, and that acquisition was a financial disaster.

But the truly awesome moment came when she asserted that the videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood show “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” No, they don’t. Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses.

So is Mrs. Fiorina so deep inside the bubble that she can’t tell the difference between facts and agitprop? Or is she deliberately spreading a lie? And most important, does it matter?

I began writing for The Times during the 2000 election campaign, and what I remember above all from that campaign is the way the conventions of “evenhanded” reporting allowed then-candidate George W. Bush to make clearly false assertions

Now we have presidential candidates who make Mr. Bush look like Abe Lincoln. But who will tell the people?

Once again, part of the problem is easily identified: the mainstream media that refuses to expose and call out GOP lies.   This conduct lead to the Iraq War fiasco, yet the media has learned nothing.  If anything, it has become even more irresponsible. 

GOP Presidential Clown Car Gaining Occupants

The circus clown atmosphere of the Republican presidential candidate pool is growing as three individuals who likely have no chance in Hell of winning the nomination indicate that they will be announcing their candidacies:  Ben Carson, Mike "Let's Over Throw the Constitution" Huckabee, and Carly Fiorina.  Other than fanning their large egos and perhaps striving to keep fees for speaking engagements rolling in down the road, one has to wonder why any of this trio of nutcases feels compelled to throw their hat into the ring.  The New York Times looks at the coming announcements.  Here are excerpts:

For the Republican Party, the presidential candidates keep coming.

The next wave arrives this week, with Carly Fiorina and former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas set to announce what most political analysts consider long-shot bids for the Republican nomination. Ben Carson announced his bid on Sunday night. They will join Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul in the race.

Ms. Fiorina is expected to start things off low-key on Monday with an announcement, followed by a call with reporters and a virtual town-hall-style meeting. Later in the week, she will head to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

Ms. Fiorina brings strong business acumen and a promise to be a more compassionate version of Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee. And she has suggested that she is the perfect antidote to Mrs. Clinton, who many believe has an easy path to the Democratic nomination.

Mr. Carson gained attention in political circles in 2013 after he was invited to give an address at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington and warned that America was headed down the path of ancient Rome. With President Obama seated a few feet away, Mr. Carson, who is black, called the Affordable Care Act “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery.” For conservatives, a star was born.

The week will also bring the return of an old political star. On Tuesday, Mr. Huckabee will gather supporters at Hempstead Hall in his hometown, Hope, Ark., to announce that he is planning to make another White House bid.  Popular with evangelical Christians, Mr. Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 and remains one of the party’s stronger campaigners. Republican strategists suggest that he could peel votes away from candidates like Mr. Cruz and Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, and that with so many Republicans seeking the nomination, another strong showing in Iowa would not be surprising.

“For guys like Walker and Cruz and maybe even Paul, Huckabee’s entry to the race probably has the effect of pulling them to the right, at least on social issues,” said Reed Galen, a political strategist who worked for former President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain of Arizona.

As if the GOP candidates need any more incentive to veer to the right.  That said, Huckabee will likely throw some religious based insanity into the mix and it will be interesting to see how far the others will go in prostituting themselves to the knuckle dragging Christofascists.