Quote:When Is The New York Times Going to Step Up and Admit This Is Crazy?
The paper of record will not look back fondly on this particular record.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 19, 2016
For some reason I can't seem to put my finger on, I felt compelled to post this Intertoobz classic in advance of tonight's New York presidential primaries.
I mean, Jesus H. Christ on the Staten Island Ferry, people, can we please knock this shit off? Can the Sanders people stop filing bullshit lawsuits and screaming about how a primary process they willingly entered is something just short of a North Korean election?
Can the Clinton people stop being condescending, and lighting votive candles in the Church of the Savvy, and screaming about how Sanders has been one big horrible sexist for treating HRC like a presidential candidate and running a tough race against her?
Stop. Just stop.
Look at the other side and…just…stop…right…now.
For example, pay attention to what's happening with Tailgunner Ted Cruz. The effort to humanize the ambassador from the Planet Reptilia continues apace and it's gaining momentum.
The New York Times went long on this theme over the weekend, talking about how Cruz is truly an intellectual giant and the champion of "constitutional conservatism," which is what we're calling the losing side at Gettysburg this century.
Yet a close reading of Mr. Cruz's policy prescriptions, influences and writings over two decades, combined with interviews with conservative intellectual leaders and Cruz allies, suggest two powerful truths about the man who might yet assume the mantle of modern conservatism.
(Nice sourcing, there.)
He would be the most conservative presidential nominee in at least a half-century, perhaps to the right of Barry Goldwater, testing the electoral limits of a personal ideology he has forged meticulously since adolescence.
And this, of course, would be a good thing, why, exactly?
But at its core, Mr. Cruz's brand of conservatism is the product of decades of careful study and manifest intellectual firepower, fusing a host of historical strands into what he has called "opportunity conservatism."
He can call it "The Caspian Sea" for all I care. It's the same old Randian trickle-down nonsense that failed in the past, is presently failing magnificently in places like Kansas, and has as virtually its own basic philosophy economic royalism financed by your money.
The epigraph for his senior thesis at Princeton, which focused on states' rights and the Ninth and 10th Amendments, quoted James Madison: "You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself." When he captured the Republican nomination in his 2012 Senate race, Mr. Cruz said he was "walking in Uncle Milton's footsteps," to honor the 100th birthday of the economist Milton Friedman.
He is fond of invoking Mr. Reagan's Cold War dictum ("We win, they lose", Margaret Thatcher's dismissal of socialism ("The problem with socialism is, eventually you run out of other people's money"
Well, I'm certainly convinced.
It goes on like this for several more paragraphs. Because, like most of the elite political media, the Times would light itself on fire rather than admit that one of our two political parties has lost its mind, we are seeing Cruz's retrograde antebellum views of the Constitution being exhumed from the grave of Alexander Hamilton Stephens, shined up for Hi-Def politics, and trotted out as though it were the shining future instead of the dead past.
The worst thing that the "conservative intellectual leaders" people are willing to say about him is that he's not necessarily a Cheney-esque blood beast on foreign policy 100 percent of the time. This is not reassuring.
Elsewhere, we have the comedy team of Heilemann and Halperin, also d/b/a The Flying Hackarama Brothers, playing foosball with jolly ol' Ted Cruz so that the latter can pretend that he hasn't been a friendless wanderer since he was in junior high. I mean, watch that thing. Can two alleged journalists debase themselves any lower without ending up in the Fujian Province?
There will be more of this self-flagellation, and it will be even worse if He, Trump gets the nod. (Halperin kicked off his 2016 Suckups Over America Tour back at the 2015 Iowa State Fair by publicizing a selfie he took with He, Trump aboard the latter's helicopter.
This was not auspicious.) So, can you folks on the other side, for the love of God and LBJ, please stop fighting over who got the biggest damn ice cream cone? You all have fewer friends than you think you do.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics...-ted-cruz/
Kathleen M Schultz ·
Midland High School
That picture at the top makes me think of the couple who corners you at the school book fair, invites your kid over, and then invites you for dinner. When the meal is over they say, "Let me tell you about Amway."
The funniest thing about the Halprin/ Heielmann/Cruz video is that Bloomberg posted it under 'Sports'.
Bob Brault ·
IUPU
A 'pendulum swinging consistently right" wouldn't really be a pendulum at all. When you choke on empty right-wing rhetoric, and someone feeds you more, will they start calling it the Flegenheimer Manuever?
And since Dominionist Ted has said " I am a Christian first and an American second", like Texas textbooks that claim the Civil War was about states rights and not slavery, his claims to be vigorous in defending the Constitution are pretty much stone cold bullshit.
Since he's running to the right of Goldwater, hopefully someone can come up with a new Daisy film using some Book of Revelations quotes...
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