The last time Texas sent a Republican to the White House the worst happened to we the wee ones. We invaded a country under false pretenses. Bush Co. had no plan to pay for the war in Iraq nor did the Bush neocons think about an exit plan. Endless wars serve as profit centers for the military/industrial complex.
Tens of thousands have been killed and maimed, as a result. G.W. Bush, Dick Cheney and their for profit war machine in the Middle East gave birth to ISIS.
The G.W. Bush Administration stuck its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as a federal drug program on the national credit card. Along with tax cuts for the donor classes. Middle class taxpayers bore the burden and picked up the tab. At the same time, Bush Co. turned a blind eye to the gambling casinos on Wall St. And when the sham games on the Street of Cards came crumbling down in 2007 and 2008 Bush Co. bailed out the scam artists.
Tens of thousands among us lost jobs and homes. Bush Co. offered no life line for everyday, average American workers and home owners.
Few of us took W. seriously when he ran for POTUS in 1999. Who would vote for him outside of Texas many Democrats here asked. He’s a dumb jerk who has a wealthy bailout Daddy when Sonny screws up.
A jerk so dumb, deep-pocketed and connected that W. managed to steal the election in 2000. And, thanks to voter disenfranchisement in 2004 (remember Ohio?) W. managed to get elected to a second term.
Today Texas Democrats are taking Ted Cruz more seriously than we did W. For Cruz is anything but a dumb jerk with a rich daddy. Cruz is known to be quite smart, he is a skillful debater and he’s one of the most smarmy and conniving politicians on the planet. Cruz is not even remotely a nice guy with whom to have a beer. The right wing ideologue is more likely to slip something nasty into an opponent’s beverage.
But most frightening of all is Cruz’s religion. As in the case of W., Cruz is a right wing Christian fundamentalist who incorporates his religious beliefs into his political agendas.
Cruz resonates with the evangelical culture warriors. He mixes what New York Times columnist David Brooks describes as political “brutalism” with a belief that he is engaged in a fight with the devil for the soul of the nation. It is only a matter of time before Cruz assumes the role of the Old Testament prophet Elijah and tries to cast down fire from heaven to destroy the “prophets of Baal” who oppose his campaign.
When Cruz says he wants to “reclaim” or “restore” America, he does not only have the Obama administration in mind. This agenda takes him much deeper into the American past. Cruz wants to “restore” the United States to what he believes is its original identity: a Christian nation.
In an increasingly secular country Cruz will appeal to mostly evangelical voters. But because Cruz is so devious and his Party is beyond desperate to stop Donald Trump, we should pay laser focused attention on how Ted Cruz advances his ambitions and his far right ideologies. Watch how his Party’s insiders and donors, who utterly loathe him, will find a way to somehow stomach Cruz.
Ted who? Where did he come from?
Ted Cruz won the election in 2012 in Texas because very few of us voted. In a state of 27 million people, Ted Cruz won with a mere 632,000 votes. Those who did vote are obviously the most ideologically extreme of the far right. I guess the rest of Republican voters didn’t care enough to support his opponent, the former Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Cruz had painted Dewhurst as an “unprincipled moderate.” Abysmally low turnout handed the Senate seat to Cruz.
Ted Cruz was chosen to be the next junior senator in Texas by less than 4 percent of the eligible voting population by virtue of winning his low-turnout (under 12%) Republican primary. This is a fact about almost all primary elections today that is often missed by media talking heads and politicos.
Cruz didn’t place first in the 2012 Republican primary; he placed second behind then-Lt. Governor David Dewhurst. However, Dewhurst, who received roughly 45 percent of the primary vote, was not able to garner enough votes to avoid a runoff. Cruz placed second with approximately 34 percent of the vote.
The 2012 summer runoff election produced an even worse turnout — 8.5 percent — the lower the turnout, the more ideologically extreme the voters tend to be.
And in that runoff, Cruz garnered 57 percent of the vote, while Dewhurst received a little over 43 percent. Cruz then advanced to the general election, where voters got to choose between him and Democrat Paul Sadler. In a Republican-dominated state, this ‘election’ wasn’t a real competition.
In short, Ted Cruz got 631,812 votes in the primary to effectively win a seat that represents 26.97 million people.
Now Texas is saddled with someone most of us don’t like and whom we repudiate. The majority of us did not vote for Cruz. But somehow a man so few of us support is now a front running Republican Presidential candidate. How on earth did this happen?
Of course, now that the stealthy right wing extremist is in the spotlight we are learning a little bit more about the junior Senator of Texas.
Ted Cruz pretends to be anti-establishment when, in fact, he is the embodiment of establishment.
Ted Cruz may style himself as an anti-establishment, grass-roots firebrand, but it's a relatively new persona. Mr Cruz has an Ivy League pedigree, having attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Law Review and graduated magna cum laude.
He clerked with the legendary conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig on a US appeals court and for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He worked on George W Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, held several executive branch jobs in his administration and served as Texas solicitor general, arguing nine cases before the US Supreme Court.
In the two years before he ran for the US Senate, he worked as a partner in the Houston office of the law firm Morgan Lewis, representing deep-pocketed corporate clients and making more than a million dollars a year.
Cruz is a treacherous underdog.
During the campaign, Mr Cruz painted Mr Dewhurst as an unprincipled moderate. He contrasted the lieutenant governor's occasional compromises with political opponents with his own record as solicitor general, which included defending his state's use of the death penalty, late-term abortion bans and the display of a Ten Commandments monument on the state capitol grounds.
Let’s not forget that Ted Cruz also defended a ban on dildos. His undergraduate college roommate is surprised.
Ted Cruz is an award winning debater.
When he was at Princeton, Mr Cruz was an award-winning debater. In 1992 he won both the US National Debating Championship and the North American Debating Championship. In 1995 he was a semifinalist in the World Universities Debating Championship.
Cruz might be a skillful debater but our Party’s candidates are far more accomplished. And they possess something Cruz lacks. Integrity.
Cruz made enemies in Washington, D.C the day he arrived. A stalwart ideologue Ted is relentlessly uncompromising.
Mr Cruz's sharp political elbows led ABC's Jonathan Karl to quip he might "need a food taster" when eating lunch with his fellow Senate Republicans.
That might be so but let’s pay attention to how some of his would be poisoners are struggling to support Cruz.
He has drafted behind surprise frontrunner Donald Trump and positioned himself to be a more realistic, compromise option for an establishment that fears, more than anything, the New York billionaire's unpredictability and brashness.
Cruz is considered a more realistic, compromise option? Be afraid. Very afraid. The Republican establishment is indeed frantic. Quite frankly Ted Cruz scares me more than Donald Trump. Cruz is far more divisive. In a covertly stealthy manner. While Donald Trump spews bigotry from every rooftop Ted Cruz sticks to cunning dog whistles. He is every bit as warped as Trump.
The company Cruz keeps.
Thanks to a writer for Mother Jones we learned that two little known movers behind the North Carolina anti-gay law are advisers to Ted Cruz.
The advocacy of these top Cruz supporters against the Charlotte ordinance eventually led the North Carolina legislature to push through one of the most sweeping anti-LGBT measures in the country, a law that has caused a national outcry and caused many companies, including PayPal, to scrap plans to invest in the state. The law, the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, strikes down all existing and future LGBT nondiscrimination statutes in North Carolina and requires that transgender people use bathrooms based on their sex at birth.
Harris' and the Benhams' state activism is significant because, if Cruz wins the presidential race, the considerable influence of these three religious activists could extend far beyond North Carolina. In February, Cruz appointed them to his campaign's advisory council for religious liberty, along with 16 other conservative Christian leaders. The GOP candidate has promised that this group will "guide his policies to protect religious liberty"—policies that could look very much like the anti-LGBT bill in North Carolina. The group is filled with key players in the anti-LGBT world, including Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council (which is classified as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center); it has already recommended that Cruz, if elected president, should stop federal employment discrimination protections for LGBT people, direct federal agencies to change their interpretation of "sex" to exclude sexual orientation and gender identity, cancel the mandate that employers provide contraceptive coverage, and much more. Cruz has surrounded himself with this group of anti-LGBT heavyweights, and the work of Harris and the Benhams in North Carolina provides a glimpse into what this group can accomplish when it comes to rolling back LGBT protections in the name of religious freedom.
Cruz’s American Taliban, in full swing.
The Republican Party is definitely between a rock and hard place this year. But it is not as if it didn’t bring it on itself. 50+ years of an ugly dog whistling scorched earth Southern Strategy was bound to backfire eventually. The country is far more diverse than it was 50 years ago. Many millennials are more opened minded and tolerant than their parents and grand parents.
So, in its effort to salvage the election in November some members of the GOP donor class decided to rally around Cruz.
GOP Donors, Eager to Defeat Donald Trump, Learn to Love Ted Cruz.
Since Mr. Cruz’s election to the Senate in 2012, many traditional Republican donors have spurned him, viewing him as a hopeless ideologue whose antics — particularly his leading role in the 2013 government shutdown — damaged the party in service of his ambitions.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
“Lots of people are giving him a second look,” said John A. Catsimatidis, a New York investor and grocery store magnate who attended the event at the Knickerbocker Club. “People are scared of Donald Trump, that’s why.”
No wonder Donald Trump’s supporters are ballistic. They are discovering that the privilege class runs their candidate’s Party. And they neither understand nor care that their leader does not know the Party’s rules on the Presidential nomination process.
One goal is to pry loose some of the large-scale money that went to candidates like Mr. Rubio and Mr. Bush earlier in the campaign. In recent months, as Mr. Cruz rose, some of the party’s wealthiest donors, such as the billionaire New York investor Paul Singer and the Ricketts family, chose to pour money into super PACs that are directly attacking Mr. Trump, rather than openly backing Mr. Cruz.
But the courtship is a delicate one. Some donors said that if Mr. Cruz was perhaps not their ideal choice for president — or even their third or fourth choice — he now seemed to be the only candidate with enough delegates to force a contested convention and deny Mr. Trump the nomination.
While the tea party anti-establishment fire brand shows how establishment he becomes, his far right base will not be pleased. And Cruz will throw them under the bus in a New York City nano-second if it helps his chances at a contested GOP convention. That said, Cruz is a polished snake oil dealer and his base may not know he’s fooled and abandoned them. On behalf of himself, of course.
Kellyanne Conway, the president of Trusted Leadership, summed up how prominent donors’ view of the Cruz-Trump fight had evolved. “It’s not just, ‘Would you rather be shot or poisoned?’ ” she said. “Now it’s, ‘This isn’t so bad.’ ”
You have no clue, Ms. Conway. For you are accepting pure poison. Ted Cruz will make W. seem somewhat reasonable.
Texas Democrats know how truly dangerous and mean-spirited far right Republicans are. The nasty and the cruel Party goes out of its way to punish the poor while enriching its donor classes and cronies.
In Texas right wing ideologues will stop at nothing to strip women of their reproductive rights and inject religious beliefs into public school textbooks. The far right also makes it next to impossible for poor and elderly minorities to vote. Extremists on the right recently voted to divert money for HIV Prevention funds to abstinence only education. The Party of hatred and intolerance will manufacture evil doing “others” and it will ruthlessly demonize them. Such efforts keep the masses distracted from the fact that the Texas Republican Party and its pervasive crony capitalism is essentially robbing the taxpayers on one level or another.
After Governor W. we thought Rick Perry couldn’t be worse. After 14 long suffering years, Rick Perry was the worst Governor of my life in Texas. Until now. Perry finally stepped down and Greg Abbott took his place. Believe it or not Abbott is the worst. Under Abbott’s reign Jim Crow voting is the comeback kid.
The current Governor is meaner than W. and Perry put together. Abbott is not hard wired for compassion, either. He is totally empathy free. And like Ted Cruz Abbott will whip out the bigotry card whenever opportunity knocks. Ted Cruz is more devious about it, though. I guess we should give Cruz some credit for that.
Welcome to Texas. The state that spawns the worst Republican politicians that money can and will buy.