Ted Cruz: ‘We Need 100 More Like Jesse Helms’ In The Senate (Huffington Post)

One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging so much in recent weeks is because I’ve found myself in a double bind when it comes to writing about politics. I get tired of all the vile and irrelevant rhetoric that passes for political discourse in America these days, and when I have the opportunity to create respectful and meaningful dialogue between people with opposing points of view — like in the composition courses I teach — I feel fulfilled to a much greater degree than when I just put my own views out here. In addition, given that one of the primary purposes of my blog right now is to further the audience for my other writing, and that I’m trying to establish at least a small reputation for comedic writing, it’s difficult to resist the temptation to slip a bon mot or a good old-fashioned slam into my political writing, even if doing so detracts from creating a respectful dialogue on a topic.

There are things out there that are deserving of ridicule, though. For example, last month a poll done by Public Policy Polling showed that 29% of Louisiana Republicans thought President Obama was to blame for the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina, compared to 28% who blamed President Bush. A hurricane that happened when Obama was still a first-year Senator from Illinois and more than three years away from becoming President, whereas President Bush was, well, President. This is possibly the best example yet of the irrational hatred that has taken over so much of American conservatism, if so many Republicans are going to blame Obama for something that took place more than three years before he became President. There are lots of things to criticize President Obama for (many of which have popped up just in 2013 alone), but to blame him for the government’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina is — and there is no other way to put this — stupid.

Ted Cruz really didn’t register on my radar until long after he’d been elected Senator from Texas this past year and sworn in. I’d heard some pundits say that he was so bat-guano insane that his Senatorial career, along with his state’s rising Hispanic population, might turn Texas into a swing state as soon as the next presidential election. I didn’t put that much stock in those prognostications because, after all, this is Texas we’re talking about here. After the spectacle Cruz has made of himself since going to Washington, though, and seeing how so many conservatives are flocking to Cruz as the party’s possible saviour in 2016, I have to wonder if there’s something in the water in Texas that’s slowly seeping to other states and turning people across the whole of the country into idiots.

I think that, for many people, Senator Cruz made his first real mark on the American consciousness during a Senate committee debate about gun law reform in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy. The argument he got into with Senator Dianne Feinstein of California made the rounds on the news a lot over the next few weeks, and Cruz’s performance in particular still gets a lot of talk today:

As difficult as it can be sometimes, I do occasionally step foot into the bowels of right-wing media, just to get first-hand knowledge of what’s being said over there. For days after the Cruz-Feinstein encounter, it was a near-constant refrain on Fox News for the angry white men and borderline-MILFs that populate that channel to play clips just of Cruz’s opening monologue, then fawn over Cruz and compare his argument to that of the wisest of Supreme Court justices. It was all I could do not to throw something at my screen as the gears of the right-wing media machine spun this story into utter absurdity. (Of course, none of them dared played Senator Feinstein’s responses to Cruz, which — and I say this as someone who’s hardly a fan of Feinstein — pretty much eviscerated Cruz’s points wholesale.)

Looking first at the substance of Cruz’s argument — which should be our primary focus — he’s making an absolutist argument that falls flat on its face like most absolutist arguments do. If you don’t understand just how bad Cruz’s argument is, just listen to him talking again, but in your mind replace “Second Amendment” with “First Amendment” and “guns” with “child porn.” Simple. Taking an absolutist position on nearly any topic is going to get you burned, and just like freedom of speech should never be used to shelter child pornographers, the Second Amendment cannot be used a two-word response to the question “Why do you think anyone, anywhere, should be able to do whatever they want with guns without the government being able to do anything about it?”

If Cruz’s argument was so weak, then why, apart from the knob-shining that the right-wing media gave it, did it get so much play? The answer to this is simply to go watch the above video again, this time with the sound off, and just look at Cruz’s face. Look at the smug, self-satisfied grin he gives himself at the “sagacity” of his own words. Look at how he shakes his head with an amused smirk every time Feinstein rips one of his arguments apart, like he’s listening to a petulant child caught with her hand in the cookie jar trying to explain she wasn’t really about to steal a cookie. What Cruz’s arguments lack in substance — and that goes for a lot of the stuff he talks about, not just guns — he makes up for in “style.” Big air quotes there.

Listening to Ted Cruz talk about nearly any topic, I can’t help but be reminded of Rush Limbaugh time and time again, and I don’t think that’s accidental. When Limbaugh was in the midst of the Sandra Fluke controversy, most attention, and rightfully so, was devoted to the impropriety of Limbaugh using his bully pulpit to refer to Fluke as a “slut.” Lost amidst that, though, was the fact that Limbaugh kept claiming that Fluke was lying about why she and her fellow Georgetown students needed birth control, because they obviously needed so many pills because of all the sex they were having. The premise here, of course, being that women have to take a birth control pill every time they have sex, and not, you know, once a day. If you’ve ever been on birth control, or you know someone who’s been on birth control, then you know that there is no birth control pill you have to take each time you have sex. Limbaugh tried to present the “real” reason for Fluke’s argument using “facts” so far removed from the truth that they were — and again, there is no better word to use in this case — stupid, but thanks to the reality-warping bubble that right-wing media has created, many conservatives, likely even including women who were on birth control themselves at the time, swallowed Limbaugh’s arguments whole, just like many conservatives reflexively agree with anything Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity, or Ann Coulter, says about any topic.

It used to be that these far-right figureheads existed outside of politics, to rile the base up and get them to vote against Democrats by electing Republicans. It was less about voting for Republicans, because most of the Republicans that got into office, for whatever quirks they had, would not pursue the far-right agenda of the Limbaughs and Hannities of the country. Ted Cruz, however, seems to be a younger Rush Limbaugh, minus the fire-and-brimstone (but keeping the smugness), plus the whole Hispanic thing. If Cruz isn’t as divorced from objective reality as Limbaugh is, he’s darn near close, and the fact that he’s getting so much talk as a potential 2016 presidential candidate is nothing short of chilling. (Again, for everyone saying Hillary can’t lose in 2016, or the Republicans can’t win unless they vastly improve their numbers with minorities: Never, ever discount the Democratic Party’s ability to throw away a sure thing by their own stupidity.)

In recent weeks Cruz has become the most prominent  elected Republican campaigning for this idea of shutting the government down, or defaulting on our debt, or doing any number of things that would wreck the country, to try to force Democrats into revoking the Affordable Care Act. Instead of admitting defeat in several battles over Obamacare, there is a sizable portion of not just conservative America, but elected Republican officials, who appear willing to wound America deeply, if not mortally, to try to force and win one last battle. A government shutdown of any length would hurt millions of workers across this country, to say nothing of those who depend on things like Social Security just to keep a roof over their heads and food on their plates. Not raising the debt ceiling, and thus forcing America to default on its debt, would trigger another huge recession with global implications. Instead of admitting that they couldn’t convince America that the Affordable Care Act was bad policy, these conservatives would rather destroy America than allow more provisions of the Affordable Care Act to come into effect (when, you would think, it would become easier to convince Americans about how bad the provisions are).

To jeopardize so much of America over a single policy debate is just insane. Given that so many of the people supporting the “kill Obamacare at all costs” are the same people who think Obama is more to blame for the government’s Hurricane Katrina failures than President Bush, though, perhaps that shouldn’t be so surprising.

A lot of the coverage of Ted Cruz’s recent remarks about former Senator (and well-documented racist, homophobic bigot) Jesse Helms has focused on how tone-deaf Cruz’s remarks were, evocative of the praising former Republican Senator Trent Lott did of Republican Senator (and segregationist presidential candidate) Strom Thurmond on the latter’s hundredth birthday, remarks that necessitated Lott’s removal as Senate Majority Leader. The comparison is fitting, and I very deeply hope (naively, I know) that Cruz will similarly be forced out of the national political spotlight for good. The thing is, Cruz frames his remarks about an alleged phone call between Helms and Republican darling John Wayne. I’m hardly a fan of John Wayne, but if there was one thing he personified that the Republican party desperately, desperately needs to get back to, it is graciousness in defeat, the willingness to be, no matter how vocal an opposition, a loyal opposition. Here is John Wayne at the Inaugural Gala for President Jimmy Carter, showing exactly the spirit that today’s Republican party needs in the worst way (the Duke’s remarks start shortly after 2:50):

If we had just forty Republicans with that spirit in the Senate, and a sizable portion of them in the House, then maybe, instead of voting over forty times to try to repeal Obamacare — each time knowing that the vote would never even get through the Senate, much less be signed into law by President Obama — maybe Washington could get some real work done and America could accelerate its climb out of the huge hole the 2008 economic collapse left us in. If Ted Cruz and his followers have their way, though, they’ll drive us all off a cliff, and we may not even survive the fall.