Still sore from losing the Republican presidential nomination to the only candidate in the race more rodential than he is, Ted Cruz returns to his former duties of stinking up the Senate. This time, it's to have hearings in which his invited guests warn that the only two Muslim members of Congress are probably working with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The charge was leveled by Chris Gaubatz, a “national security consultant” who has moonlighted as an undercover agitator of Muslim groups that he accuses of being terrorist outfits, and it was directed at Reps. Keith Ellison (D-Mich.) and André Carson (D-Ind.). At the heart of his accusation is the attendance by those two members at a 2008 convention hosted by the Islamic Society of North America — a Muslim umbrella group, which Gaubatz claims is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood.
“I attended a convention in Columbus, Ohio, in 2008, organized by Muslim Brotherhood group, ISNA, and both the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons had recruitment and outreach booths,” Gaubatz said in his testimony. “Both Congressman Keith Ellison, MN, and Andre Carson, IN, spoke at the Muslim Brotherhood event.”
That would indeed be compelling, if the Islamic Society of North America was in fact sekritly part of the Muslim Brotherhood and various federal departments were all in league with them because sekrit reasons. But it isn't, because the whole thing is just part of the Frank Gaffney-led conservative (cough-racist-cough) effort to claim every last American who has ever touched or shaken hands with or made eye contact with a Muslim person, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to conservative anti-tax kingpin Grover Norquist, are all sekritly probably working with the terrorists. It is a conspiracy theory that is quite prominent in all the usual racist forums, aka FoxNews.com, and is generally mentioned somewhere between complaining that Hillary Clinton had an American ambassador murdered and opining that we still don't know where the sitting president's real birth certificate is because Hawaii is pretty close to Kenya and isn't that suspicious.
Which all works out, of course, because Sen. Ted Cruz actually appointed Frank Gaffney himself to be one of his national security advisers, and so is apparently well-versed in lunatic conspiracy theories about how the sekrit Muslims are coming to kill us all.
Short version of this story: Sen. Ted Cruz continues to be a remarkable dumbass. The Republican Party continues to elevate lunatic-peddled conspiracy theories into House and Senate speeches and testimony. Conservatives continue the tradition of masturbatory fantasy-building rather than bothering to deal with any of the very real problems that might need addressing, from Zika to healthcare to lead-tainted water to climate change to Every Last Other Thing. An entire movement premised on fantasies and shrieking at imagined shadows.