a brief history of the Cruz crawl upward through the muck of political slime:
'The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist
by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather
than charming, and seeks to be feared rather
than loved. To this type belong many lunatics.'
Bertrand Russell
THESE DAYS THE CULTURE OF THE INSANE AND BITTER CYNIC IS,...
OF COURSE, BEST OBSERVED IN WASHINGTON WHERE WE SEE that the fratricide of failure to compromise unleashing the darkest, most draconian measures of political posturing. This historically began after 1890 when we became populated in huge numbers of Europeans who were different from the original British settlers. They were Catholics and Jewish, they often spoke languages other than English or were illiterate farmers. In one large country, they joined the survivors of the slaughter of the Indians, liberated slaves, and conquered Mexicans. To meld them into a unified nation required immense efforts of compromise and mediation on the part of all agents of the state. The greatest task was to make the idealism of the Constitution real for every citizen. Along the way newcomers faced unaccountable social offenses, riots, and the horror of the Civil War. But slowly, decent, intelligent men and women created a living nation from the abstract principles of the state. It all seemed to be working out rather well.
Until the dawn of the twentieth-century that is, when our political style allowed asinine half-baked hair-brains to trample about on the political scene. Folks with names like Warren G. Harding and Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms and Richard Milhous Nixon began to appear; along with equally ignorant reporters chasing around after Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, various state troopers, Paula Jones, and God knows what else. Millions were spent on attack ads and those who been bought-off refused to join the process of compromise. The political world was now safe for the lobbyists and cynics and Voter Suppression and refusal to allow women equal rights in terms of equal pay and protection of their own bodies.
Reflex replaced thoughtful analysis. Slashing and lacerating language were now present on the Congressional and Senate floors, all of which were now employed against our new president by fellows with names like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and and the ever-stupid Louie Gohmert as well as the less-than-intelligent Sarah Palin. The tone was sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental. Facts no longer mattered. Lies were told. Compromise disappeared. The professional politician now demanded the intolerant call of: Destroy The Affordable Care Act became the prime example of the process, and on a lesser scale: Death Panels and Birther Issues. The era of respect for the Presidency was behind us, perhaps forever. The implication was clear: There were no allegations that our President was not a good-and-decent man, no issues of promiscuity on his part, most admired his family, but there must be something. Aha! The Son-of-a-bitch is Black!
In a spirit of mindless destruction on our political Right, whether they admitted it or not, was filled with bigots and racial incoherence became the norm in rather bizarre ways: the enemies of the president must maintain an adversarial stance without mentioning race, and swerve from truth to mere innuendo, and who better could be called upon to do that in a warble of implications of disaster but with a venomous tone other than the ever-annoying Donald Trump? The publicity hound and serial candidate felt left out so he stepped up to the plate by announcing that he was, once again, thinking about running for the Presidency himself and reassured us that he was still on the hunt for our President's birth certificate. All of which which happened to be on the exact same day that John Boehner invited Prime Minister 'Bibi' Netanyahu to speak to Congress behind the President's back and John McCain announced that the President's priorities were: All screwed-up.
What mattered most to each one of them was to undermine the President.
The continuation of this endless and somewhat disguised racial slaughter then came with the refusal to move the nomination forward of Loretta Lynch as our new Attorney General which, of course, had nothing at all to do with race, according to Mitch McConnell. The "invisible attack" then ramped-up with the Iowa Senator Steve King adding that his feeling was that our President was "an anti-Semite" who hated the Jews. The cheerleaders were having a heyday of political football filled with lies and innuendo, along with the essential element of the ever-present sneer, and the assurance of the asinine Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert that, In case our government runs amok, the guns are here, the Second Amendment is here, to make sure that all the rest of the amendments are followed.
The gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies of the Far Right were then, once again, aided-and-abetted by another Texan with a somewhat less than sound state of mind who happened to be the recently elected Junior Senator from Texas by the name of Raphael Edward "Ted" Cruz, a highly educated headcase egomaniac of Cuban descent born in Alberta, Canada in December of 1970 and when his family moved to Katy, Texas went on to Princeton, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and became the longest-serving Solicitor General in Texas history prior to being elected as a United States Senator in 2012.
'The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist
by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather
than charming, and seeks to be feared rather
than loved. To this type belong many lunatics.'
Bertrand Russell
THESE DAYS THE CULTURE OF THE INSANE AND BITTER CYNIC IS,...
OF COURSE, BEST OBSERVED IN WASHINGTON WHERE WE SEE that the fratricide of failure to compromise unleashing the darkest, most draconian measures of political posturing. This historically began after 1890 when we became populated in huge numbers of Europeans who were different from the original British settlers. They were Catholics and Jewish, they often spoke languages other than English or were illiterate farmers. In one large country, they joined the survivors of the slaughter of the Indians, liberated slaves, and conquered Mexicans. To meld them into a unified nation required immense efforts of compromise and mediation on the part of all agents of the state. The greatest task was to make the idealism of the Constitution real for every citizen. Along the way newcomers faced unaccountable social offenses, riots, and the horror of the Civil War. But slowly, decent, intelligent men and women created a living nation from the abstract principles of the state. It all seemed to be working out rather well.
Until the dawn of the twentieth-century that is, when our political style allowed asinine half-baked hair-brains to trample about on the political scene. Folks with names like Warren G. Harding and Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms and Richard Milhous Nixon began to appear; along with equally ignorant reporters chasing around after Whitewater, Gennifer Flowers, various state troopers, Paula Jones, and God knows what else. Millions were spent on attack ads and those who been bought-off refused to join the process of compromise. The political world was now safe for the lobbyists and cynics and Voter Suppression and refusal to allow women equal rights in terms of equal pay and protection of their own bodies.
Reflex replaced thoughtful analysis. Slashing and lacerating language were now present on the Congressional and Senate floors, all of which were now employed against our new president by fellows with names like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner and and the ever-stupid Louie Gohmert as well as the less-than-intelligent Sarah Palin. The tone was sometimes apocalyptic and always judgmental. Facts no longer mattered. Lies were told. Compromise disappeared. The professional politician now demanded the intolerant call of: Destroy The Affordable Care Act became the prime example of the process, and on a lesser scale: Death Panels and Birther Issues. The era of respect for the Presidency was behind us, perhaps forever. The implication was clear: There were no allegations that our President was not a good-and-decent man, no issues of promiscuity on his part, most admired his family, but there must be something. Aha! The Son-of-a-bitch is Black!
In a spirit of mindless destruction on our political Right, whether they admitted it or not, was filled with bigots and racial incoherence became the norm in rather bizarre ways: the enemies of the president must maintain an adversarial stance without mentioning race, and swerve from truth to mere innuendo, and who better could be called upon to do that in a warble of implications of disaster but with a venomous tone other than the ever-annoying Donald Trump? The publicity hound and serial candidate felt left out so he stepped up to the plate by announcing that he was, once again, thinking about running for the Presidency himself and reassured us that he was still on the hunt for our President's birth certificate. All of which which happened to be on the exact same day that John Boehner invited Prime Minister 'Bibi' Netanyahu to speak to Congress behind the President's back and John McCain announced that the President's priorities were: All screwed-up.
What mattered most to each one of them was to undermine the President.
The continuation of this endless and somewhat disguised racial slaughter then came with the refusal to move the nomination forward of Loretta Lynch as our new Attorney General which, of course, had nothing at all to do with race, according to Mitch McConnell. The "invisible attack" then ramped-up with the Iowa Senator Steve King adding that his feeling was that our President was "an anti-Semite" who hated the Jews. The cheerleaders were having a heyday of political football filled with lies and innuendo, along with the essential element of the ever-present sneer, and the assurance of the asinine Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert that, In case our government runs amok, the guns are here, the Second Amendment is here, to make sure that all the rest of the amendments are followed.
The gaffes, mistakes, idiosyncrasies of the Far Right were then, once again, aided-and-abetted by another Texan with a somewhat less than sound state of mind who happened to be the recently elected Junior Senator from Texas by the name of Raphael Edward "Ted" Cruz, a highly educated headcase egomaniac of Cuban descent born in Alberta, Canada in December of 1970 and when his family moved to Katy, Texas went on to Princeton, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, and became the longest-serving Solicitor General in Texas history prior to being elected as a United States Senator in 2012.
Here was a guy who denied the existence of global warming, to which Kevin Tranburth, a leading scientist from The National Center of Atmospheric Research replied, Ted Cruz is full of claptrap...absolute bunk! And also caused fellow Republican Senator John McCain to call him a 'Whacko-Bird' when Cruz announced his certainty that the Secretary of Defense, a decorated war hero by the name of Chuck Hegel, was in actuality a secret spy for North Korea. He was not alone. Other insane remarks came forth from members of 'The Bats in the Belfry Club of the Far-Right-Wing' from none other than Sarah Palin, who informed African-Americans that they did not know what the word 'Slavery' meant. Adding with her disingenuous ever-present smile that, Thugs are getting athletic scholarships over more deserving white kids...As the unenlightened and intentionally ignorant Senator from Texas continued to deny the existence of our planet becoming unlivable due to global warming and our failure to preserve it through science and common sense.
Cruz and his crowd of newly-minted Tea Party Congressmen now began to swing their broadswords of racism and ideology in earnest. Indifferent to public opinion or a desire for consensus, naked power became commonplace against the blacks and the Mexicans and the immigrants and the feminists and the pornographers and the liberals all of which was done in the thrall of a worldview of of a White's Only America for the powerful and rich. Simple-minded insanity was now the name of the political game. When it came to Iran negotiation was out and war was in. When it came to women abortion was a no-no and unwanted pregnancy became the thing to do even if you had been raped. All political discourse on an adult level was far too complicated because they were unable to understand difficult or complicated ideas - so they used naked power to get their way; and Damn the consequences, full-speed-ahead !
What chance does Obama have against the ever growing tide malevolence and antipathy tossed his way because of the color of his skin? Domestically, he was indicted for being too liberal or too conservative or too socialist, too soft or too callous, too indifferent to the wants and needs and desires of Congress. In foreign affairs, his most poisonous critics wanted only to go to war and what patriotic American would refuse to do that? After all, we're not even certain that he actually is an American. What we need to do is multiply through division. It's not the time to honor good taste. It's time to use deceit and double-dealing deception in order to get our way.
There are human reasons for this. The most effective men and women who could do so no longer run for office. Many cannot afford to do so. Others are unwilling to place themselves in the arena of continuous scrutiny of the American press where no rumor, innuendo, or allegation of promiscuity goes unprinted. Alleged men and women of God then crawled up through the political ranks to draw the average American into a world of untruths disguised as patriotism because men and women who are intelligent and willing to compromise, those who do not even think about destroying the enemy, refused to enter the political fray.
Instead, we have Senator Ted Cruz from Texas announcing that he is going to run for the office of the Presidency, a man of immense vanity who peddles bromides filled with nonsense instead of intelligent discourse, and does so from the mega-church and university called Liberty where Jerry Falwell once peddled videos that virtually accused President Clinton of murdering Vincent Foster. Senator Ted, a man of reflex rather than thought and analysis is the one who once said from the floor of the Senate as he was about to cause the shut-down of the United States Government...I will credit my father... he invented green eggs and ham...He did it two ways. The easy way was he would put green food coloring in - but if you take spinach and mix it into the eggs the eggs turn green. I do no like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am...
...Which proved the point that Samuel Beckett once made in the play Waiting for Godot: We are all born mad. Some of us remain so.'
What fascinates me about this is that not so long ago most Americans would deem Cruz to be a sociopath unfit to hold office. He has now risen through the political slime and through the muck of the right-wing agenda to become a major candidate for the office of the President of the United States. Perhaps Jerry Brown the Governor of California said it best, 'That man betokens such a level of ignorance and direct falsification of scientific data. It's shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.'
What kind of a guy is he? You talk about double-speak: It seems to be one who lacks the courage of his theoretical convictions, in that now that he is running for the Presidency and his wife has taken a-leave-of-absence from her executive position at Goldman Sachs which has caused the loss of his family health-care plan, he has now signed-up for what he once insisted that he desired to completely abolish: The Affordable Care Act...
...As Jenny Eclair so elegantly said, Sometimes the sight of a slug can bring up my breakfast...
...And all I can say to that is...
...Amen!
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