Daily Archives: March 22, 2016

03.22.16
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Ted Cruz Makes Clear How Much He Hates America

There aren’t really any words.

“We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant Al Qaeda or ISIS presence,” the Texas senator said in a statement. “We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.”

It’s a mark of the wild danger howling through the country that this kind of loose and dangerous talk drips easily from a major candidate. What happened in Brussels is a horror, and it is the kind we’ll be living with for many years. There is no easy solution (more on this forthwith), but there is also no question that this kind of weaponized rhetoric only serves the cruel forces of Islamic militancy.

What’s clear is that Ted Cruz’s major problem with America is that it is, well, America. This is clear in a further part of his statement.

“The days of the United States voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to show how progressive and enlightened we are at an end,” he said. “Our country is at stake.”

The “voluntarily surrendering” is inflammatory and reality-ignoring and dangerous enough (were it true, you’d think Cruz would have the stones to pursue impeachment). It’s the second part that really captures his whole program: he has nothing but contempt for the Enlightenment values the country was founded upon. He is directly saying that since our country is at stake, everything that makes America what it is should be thrown over the side. It’s a sneering yawp at modernity itself.

He means it, too. He can’t really believe that ISIS is an existential threat. But the march of progress is an existential threat to his perverted value system. The country is at stake only because atavistic reactionaries like Ted Cruz aren’t in complete control anymore. He wants a grim mix of plutocracy and theocracy, and fears that he won’t be able to get it. Attacks in Europe give him the opportunity to promote his real program: the erasure of post-Puritan progress.

Combined with Trump’s lunatic ravings about borders and shutting it down “until we figure out what’s going on” (an off-the cuff remark that was made into a somehow-viable policy), it is clear that the GOP has zero interest in the threat of radical Islam other than its use for them in their endless culture war. Everything is a symbol, a fetish object for their retrograde obsessions, and the deaths of dozens of Europeans is merely a cudgel to win the next battle.

03.22.16
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Ted Cruz Is A Fanatical Liar, Part Who Can Count

frank-gaffney1

Gawker noted this interview Ted Cruz had about yesterday in which the somewhat controversial notions of one of his senior advisors came up.

“Frank Gaffney is someone I respect,” Ted Cruz said Monday, defending his foreign policy advisor. Frank Gaffney is a serious thinker.” Frank Gaffney thinks that President Barack Obama, Governor Chris Christie, and longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin are part of a secret Muslim conspiracy.

“I don’t know what he said in 2009,” Cruz said, after Blitzer read him a quote about Obama being America’s first Muslim president. “I just read it to you,” Blitzer said. “I don’t have the full context,” Cruz said.

To say you don’t know this about Gaffney is, without a doubt, an absolute lie. There is literally no way not to know it. It’s, like, the only thing about the guy. It’s his whole essence: implacable hostility toward anything Muslim and wild conspiracies about the secretly powerful role that Muslims have in American life, the proof being the bombing campaigns we’re running all over the Muslim world, apparently. It’s all there is about Gaffney.  Saying you aren’t aware of what he said is like hiring Sammy Sosa as a hitting coach and not only saying that you weren’t aware of the steroid thing, but you didn’t even hear about all these home runs. “He just interviewed really well!”

Of course, the real lie in this is “Frank Gaffney is a serious thinker.”

Bringing someone like Gaffney in is a sign that you are going to have a team of fabulists and messianic, people who desperately wish they could be at war with an existential foe like the Nazis (although not doing to actual fighting, god forbid). They’ll blow up a real and serious threat to an unrecognizable proportion to live out their McArthur fantasies.

It’s a sign of the Republican Party today that one of the only two possible candidates bringing in someone like Gaffney elicits little more than a shrug. It’s an even stronger tell that the party has gone completely insane that in order to “pivot to the middle” even slightly, to appeal to mainstream Americans, Ted Cruz knows he has to straight-up lie regarding the only thing that matters about a top advisor.