Cruzing for a Bruising

So now Ted Cruz appears to be the Republican Party’s best chance to save itself from Donald Trump. Cruz is GOP’s great savior and the reason may well be better devil you know rather than the one you do not. The Republican Party’s establishment-led Stop Trump wing is now spending millions on TV ads in a desperate 11th-hour effort to block Trump from winning the next big states to vote for a GOP nominee: Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Illinois and North Carolina. But putting Cruz at the top of their ticket is as dicey as Trump—and more dangerous.  

 Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, wrote “If Ted Cruz is the Republican Party’s cure for Donald Trump, the antidote may be worse than the poison.” For Cruz is as much if not a greater a conniving, uncompromising, power-hungry demagogue as Trump. “Trump, at least, cloaks his unthinkable policies beneath a certain populist appeal,” wrote Eugene Robinson. “Cruz’s self-assured extremism tells whole classes of voters—independents, minorities, women—to look elsewhere.”

Ruth Marcus, another Washington Post columnist, has written that Cruz is “more dangerous” than Trump and gave further examples of his demagoguery, comparing his behavior in the Senate to one of the 20th century’s most notorious senators, Republican Joseph McCarthy, whose anti-communist crusade destroyed hundreds of lives.  “Where Trump needs the ego balm of adoring masses, Cruz couldn’t care less what others think of him, except to the extent it might interfere with his ability to achieve his end,” Marcus wrote. “Just ask the Senate colleagues who join in remarkable, scarcely contained bipartisan loathing of the man.” She continued, “He revealed his true character even earlier in his Senate tenure when he went after former senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary. In a manner that evoked the worst of Joseph McCarthy, Cruz smeared Hagel with unsupported insinuations that the nominee received money from foreign governments or extremist groups. There seems to be no argument too low for him to make—for example, his recent, four-Pinocchio claim that 'the overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats.'"

A Huffington Post columnist noted, “Can any other politician lie with the gall, the unflappability, and the effortlessness of Senator Ted Cruz?”

Former president Jimmy Carter recently explained that between a choice of Trump and Cruz, “I think I would choose Trump… which may surprise some of you, but the reason is Trump has proven already that he’s completely malleable. I don’t think he has any fixed opinions that he would really go to the White House and fight for.”

Political commentator, Robert Reich, Robert Reich wrote of Ted Cruz: “He’s more fanatical…Trump is a bully and bigot but doesn’t hew to any sharp ideological line. Cruz is a fierce ideologue: He denies the existence of man-made climate change, rejects same-sex marriage, wants to abolish the Internal Revenue Service, believes the Second Amendment guarantees everyone a right to guns, doesn’t believe in a constitutional divide between church and state, favors the death penalty, opposes international agreements, embraces a confrontational foreign policy, rejects immigration reform, demands the repeal of 'every blessed word of Obamacare,' and takes a strict 'originalist' view of the meaning of the Constitution.”

Retired General Wesley Clark, who has run for president as a hawkish Democrat, told Fox News late last year that that’s exactly what Cruz is. “He’s a Princeton graduate, and a Harvard guy and a 150 IQ so something, he’s supposed to be a brilliant guy, he doesn’t know the first thing about military operations, or more disturbing is he’ll simply says whatever draws an applause, and that’s the definition of a demagogue.”

Cruz speaks with twisted candor and no shame. What you see is a politician who is as disturbing as he is dangerous.

Cruz twists and exaggerates facts or spouts inflammatory lies, all in the service of promoting himself and his beliefs. He’s a serial distorter of anything inflammatory. After a mass shooting and killings at a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic in November, by a man who reportedly told police he was motivated by the faked video, Cruz told reporters before the Iowa caucuses the murderer was a “transgendered leftist activist.” In this same category of toxically mistaken beliefs, Cruz told the Conservative Political Action Conference that Democrats threatened the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.”

Trump may pledge to order U.S. troops to torture any suspected enemy and break international laws of war, but Cruz implied he’d use nuclear arms to make the Middle East’s desert sands “glow in the dark.” Trump would defund Planned Parenthood as long as it provides abortions,. Cruz not only wants to defund and shut down Planned Parenthood, he wants to prosecute the organization. Cruz said ISIS is ‘right now crucifying Christians in Iraq, literally nailing Christians to trees.’ It wasn’t, and Cruz wasn’t able to offer any evidence. Cruz described a "strong bipartisan majority" in the House that voted to repeal Obamacare; two Democrats had joined the Republicans. He bluntly claimed that “the jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws, almost without exception… have the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.” This is not true. He lied about Ben Carson leaving the race just days before the Iowa caucus; that Obamacare is the biggest job-killer in the U.S.; that gun control proponents want to confiscate all guns; that Obama hasn’t bombed ISIL’s oil fields because he’s worried about global warming; that most violent criminals are Democrats; that under Obama the median wage for women fell; that Obama’s Iranian nuclear deal lets Iranians self-inspect, and more. He misleadingly says Arizona’s social welfare cuts as a purported result of tougher immigration enforcement; Trump on supposedly supporting socialized health care; Cruz saying it’s a tradition that Supreme Court nominees don’t get confirmed in presidential years; exaggerating how much incomes rose under Ronald Reagan; or saying Obama’s 2013 immigration bill would ease up on background checks.

Trump, for all his ugly bluster, ] knows how to compromise. That’s not the case with Cruz, whose views are far from the U.S. mainstream, believes Obama is the most radical president ever, and even though he was a clerk for a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, has railed against its rulings upholding Obamacare and same-sex marriage as “the very definition of tryanny.” 

Trump may be a nativist, racist, vindictive and angry white man who will take others down to build himself up. But Cruz is a darker character whose uncompromising warmongering, intolerances, vain pieties, chronic lying and eager embrace of scorched-earth tactics is a more toxic and ruinous brew for America. Cruz is a Messianic maniac. Cruz seeks to impose Christian ‘Sharia’ laws instead.

Adapted from here