Extremist, Ted Cruz Predicts a Revolt if the GOP Uses Brokered Convention

While I find all of the Republican presidential candidate to be frightening (Kasich is just as extreme as Cruz and Trump, but knows when to shut his mouth), perhaps the scariest is Ted Cruz, a true extremist who seemingly is every bit as insane as his lunatic father, Rafael Cruz, an anti-gay extremist extraordinaire.   With the GOP establishment literally many years too late in recognizing the whirlwind it created by welcoming Christofascists, white supremacists and know nothings into the party, Cruz is threatening a revolt of the swamp fever afflicted party base if either he or Donald Trump are not crowned as the party nominee.  A piece in Mother Jones looks at Cruz's threat. Meanwhile, a piece in The Advocate looks at the insanity and extremism that has enveloped Cruz under the tutelage of his nutcase father.   First, these highlights on Cruz's threats to the party establishment:

Ted Cruz, campaigning in Wisconsin ahead of Tuesday's primary, says that if the Republican Party establishment were to anoint a candidate other than the two leaders in primary and caucus voting—Cruz and Donald Trump—at the party convention this summer, the GOP base would "quite rightly revolt."

Talking with reporters in the basement of a Masonic Center in Madison, Wisconsin, shortly before recording a town hall with Fox News in the auditorium upstairs, Cruz dismissed the concept of a new candidate like Ryan entering the fray. Currently, the Republican National Convention's Rule 40 mandates that a candidate must win a majority of the vote in at least eight states in order to get his or her name nominated at the convention, effectively preventing anyone other than Trump or Cruz from being placed in contention. Cruz rejected any suggestion that the convention would scrap Rule 40, as has been widely speculated.

"Both Donald and I have been very clear," Cruz said. "We shouldn't be changing the rules because Washington is unhappy with how the people are voting."

He added, "The rules are the rules."

Still, should party leaders attempt to nominate a third candidate, Cruz painted a dark vision for how that would go down. "This fevered pipe dream of Washington, that at the convention they would parachute in some white knight who will save the Washington establishment, it is nothing less than a pipe dream," Cruz said. "It ain't gonna happen. If it did happen, the people would quite rightly revolt."

Cruz's concept of a revolt sounds far more peaceable than the rioting Trump has envisioned if he wins the voting but loses at the convention. Cruz said that if a convention selects a third candidate, "the voters would naturally say, 'To heck with you, we're staying home.'"

Personally, I can't summon a shred of sympathy for the so-called GOP establishment.  They made this entire catastrophe happen.  They are now reaping what they sowed.   As for Ted Cruz's sinister extremism and dangerous mindset, here are excerpts from The Advocate:

If you follow politics at all, you probably know Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz’s major issue stances — he’s anti-LGBT equality, anti-abortion rights, a proponent of free-market economics and an aggressive foreign policy.

But to really kow Cruz’s worldview, it’s important to know his father, mentor, and top campaign surrogate, 76-year-old Rev. Rafael Cruz.

“Rafael Cruz is an extremist,” Chuck Smith, CEO of Equality Texas, tells The Advocate. “He is the senator’s role model. Rafael Cruz spoke at the World Congress of Families event in Utah with a gay-bashing lineup of hateful speakers, and he is Ted’s surrogate traveling across the country on the campaign trail bashing gay people. Like father, like son.”

Ted Cruz, for instance, calls the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling “lawless” and “fundamentally illegitimate,” but his father says it’s the work of the devil. “The devil overplayed his hand with that decision on June 26,” Rafael Cruz said in a speech last August, predicting that godly Americans will rise up against it. 

Among Rafael Cruz’s other antigay greatest hits: At the World Congress of Families event last November, he said gay people want to legalize pedophilia, starting with an effort to strike down age-of-consent laws. Indeed, he has frequently described LGBT people as sexual predators. He has also said marriage equality is part of a government plot to “destroy the concept of God” and establish socialism in the United States.

Rafael Cruz seems to have long believed his son was destined for great things. “Essentially his father groomed him for this moment,” conservative Iowa radio talk show host and Ted Cruz backer Steve Deace told The Boston Globe in January, as father and son were campaigning in the state.

“By the time Ted Cruz was 9, his father was providing heavy doses of conservative Christian politics at the dinner table,” wrote Globe reporter Tracy Jan. “By 13, the younger Cruz had memorized the Constitution and through high school toured the state of Texas, delivering speeches on free market economics and the Constitution.”

[H[e [Refael] now touts himself as an ordained minister. His theology goes beyond traditional evangelical and fundamentalist views. He “is an advocate of Christian dominionism, which essentially holds that fundamentalist Christians should take over, well, just about everything,” David Corn wrote in a February Mother Jones article.

Corn described Rafael Cruz as a “freelancing evangelical,” and that pretty much sums it up. He has claimed to be a pastor at a church in Dallas, but there is no record of such an affiliation, according to a Washington Spectator investigation. That investigation also found that the Bible college he claims to have attended doesn’t exist.

However, the conservative Christian crowds he draws apparently haven’t questioned his credentials, and religious right leaders see him as an asset to his son’s campaign. “He’s a clarifying check that Ted’s the real deal,” antigay Iowa activist Bob Vander Plaats told the Globe.

The lack of distance between father and son shows how dangerous a Ted Cruz presidency would be, Smith tells The Advocate. He “lets his father say all the fiery gay-bashing rhetoric, but Ted Cruz will implement that rhetoric in his policies and appointments,” Smith says. “He is the worst candidate in the race, and I have no doubt he will discriminate against gay and transgender people all over the United States if he is elected president.”

“While Donald Trump is disturbing, Ted Cruz is dangerous, . . . 

One thing I have noted over the years as I have watched and kept an eye on the batshitery of the far right Christians: nowhere else other than in Christofascist circles can one get away with peddling outright lies about one's credentials and claim to have attended non-existent  "bible colleges" and it simply doesn't matter.  It speaks volumes about oth Cruz's and those who support them. 

Why Is the Media Ignoring Ted Cruz's Embrace of 'Kill the Gays'?

Ted Cruz attends "Kill the Gays" gathering

Even before I learned of the horrors occurring in Paris yesterday where we have again seen the ugly finger prints of fundamentalist religion, I had planned to write about the American media's silence on the the attendance of several GOP presidential nominee candidates at the falsely named National Religious Liberties Conference where the execution of gays was called for numerous times.   Imagine if Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders attended an event where the murder of Christians (or blacks or Jews) was advocated - the media would be beside itself and the coverage would have been non-stop.   But the advocating of the murder of gays bu the "godly folk" gets almost a free pass as do the GOP contenders who attended.   Yes, the GOP candidates are all claiming that they did not know about the agenda of some of the event hosts - even though in Ted Cruz's case he had been asked about the very issue BEFORE he attended the event - but all that proves is either (i) they support the execution of gays, (ii) they are liars, or (iii) that their campaigns are so poor at vetting events that the candidates are too incompetent to ever occupy the White House.  A piece in Huffington Post looks at this disturbing near silence.  Here are highlights:

Last weekend Senator Ted Cruz, along with fellow GOP presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, spoke at a conference in Des Moines headed up by a man who advocates the execution of gay people -- per his interpretation of the bible -- and who made his call for mass extermination once again, onstage at the event, the National Religious Liberties Conference. Pastor Kevin Swanson has said in the past that Christians should attend gay weddings and hold up signs telling the newly married gay and lesbian couples that they "should be put to death." He was an advocate of Uganda's infamous "Kill the Gays" bill, which he saw as a "model."

At the confab over the weekend, where he introduced Huckabee, Jindal and Cruz to the audience -- and where Ted Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, an anti-gay Tea Party crusader, was a star speaker -- he reiterated his death penalty call . . .

On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow, using extensive clips of video of the speech that had been posted by the indispensable Right Wing Watch, covered the conference in depth, and was rightly horrified that it even took place and that presidential candidates were there.

"This is a political event. This is a Republican presidential candidates' event," Maddow said. "It really was a 'kill-the-gays' call to arms. This was a conference about the necessity of the death penalty as a punishment for homosexuality."

But except for scattered online media coverage and blog posts, that was it. CNN's Jake Tapper asked Cruz if it was appropriate to speak at the conference before the event -- and Cruz dodged the question, claiming to know nothing of the pastor's views, and spinning back to religious people supposedly being under attack -- but there was no coverage I could find on CNN after the conference and focused on this evangelical leader who called for a future genocide after introducing presidential candidates who lauded him. As far as I can tell, no broadcast networks or major American newspaper covered the blood-curdling speech in which several times Swanson said the punishment for homosexuality is the death penalty. 

It's 2015 and much of the media seem to accept, still, that LGBT people can be talked about this way at an event attended by presidential candidates and that it's not news. They view it as par for the course, religious conservatives doing what they do. It's as if they have blinders on. Indeed, if Ted Cruz -- or Huckabee or Jindal -- attended an event at which the host hinted at mass murder of Jews, African-Americans or any other group it would be a massive media story. He'd be forced to answer questions about it, at debates (and it didn't come up at the last debate), in press conferences and in interviews non-stop. 

Swanson may not be Huckabee's, Jindal's or Cruz's own pastor, but they attended a hate conference organized by Swanson, who introduced them onstage, in the middle of a presidential primary race. The fact that it seems to be viewed as just another ho-hum campaign stop suggests we've not come as far on LGBT right as we all like to tell ourselves.

Hate flourishes when not challenged and condemned.  Just look at ISIS.   What is frightening about Swanson and the tacit endorsement of his views by Cruz and the other GOP candidates is that it sets the stage for some Christian fundamentalist to decide to put the call to murder into action thinking, just like the murderers in Paris, that they are doing god's work.  And most of the American media will be complicit in it because the haters were allowed to go unchallenged.  And people wonder why I hold "journalists" in low regard?

Another Campaign Untruth: Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro

Ted Cruz and Rafael Cruz- two consummate liars and nutcases

It increasing seems that being a shameless liar is a prerequisite to being a Republican presidential nominee contestant.  Either the candidates themselves are telling the lies or close family members are providing the false story lines.  Candidly, as the Christofascists have risen in power within the GOP, the level of lying and demagoguery has directly increased.  Now, Ted Cruz finds himself under fire for his father's fraudulent lies that have been woven into Cruz's own fairy tale narrative.  The older Cruz - who in my opinion belongs in an insane asylum - has made claims of "fighting for freedom" in Cuba as a young man.  The trouble is that many of the details he used to embellish his story simply are not true.  The New York Times looks at the truth about the elder Cruz's made up narrative.  Here are excerpts:

Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.

Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination. 

But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.

The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.  In fact, Mr. País was killed seven months later and in a different place and manner.

In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.

Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers.   “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”

There is no question that Rafael Cruz, who is now a pastor and his son’s most effective and popular campaign surrogate, was beaten in 1957 at the hands of agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator.

The reason Mr. Cruz was arrested, however, is less clear, and he has offered different explanations. In an interview alongside his son in March, Mr. Cruz said he had sought to recruit to the revolutionary cause someone who turned out to be an informant working for Batista’s regime. The 1959 account, though, did not mention any informant . . . . 

Mario Martínez, who Mr. Cruz confirmed was part of his small revolutionary cell, said he did not recall Mr. Cruz’s being apprehended for trying to recruit someone and said he believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used. 

[N]one of the Cuban historians, former comrades of Mr. Cruz in his hometown or veterans of the Santiago battle reached by The Times could corroborate his story. 

[V]eterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.  Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.   Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.

In his book “A Time for Truth,” published in June, Ted Cruz writes that the rebels who attacked the Santiago Police Headquarters met devastating resistance, and “All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank País.”

But of the scores of rebels who participated in the attack, only a few were killed, according to eyewitness accounts and historical documents.

It looks like Ben Carson is not the only GOP candidate challenged by truth and veracity.  Both Carson and Cruz are pushing narratives that play well with the idiots and Christofascists of the GOP regardless of whether or not they bear any semblance to reality.  Among most normal and honest people, this amounts to lying.  Deliberately lying.