Sunday, March 22, 2015

The Truth Behind Ted Cruz’s Lies


With Joe McCarthy want to be Ted Cruz announcing the kick off of his presidential campaign tomorrow, it is even more important that his lies be exposed and the his dangerous agenda understood.  The man is nothing less than a demagogue and - as is usually the case with those who wrap them selves in claimed Christian belief - an incessant liar.  Note that Cruz is making his kick off at Liberty University, a foul boil on Virginia's reputation that is perhaps even more extreme than Pat Robertson's reality challenged Regent University.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at Cruz and his lies. Here are excerpts:
[F]reshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz is set to announce that he’s running for president. And he’s not going to announce at the Alamo or any other defiant Texas-type monument. He’s making a pilgrimage straight to the birthplace of the Moral Majority, the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. The setting makes sense for a man who believes that God has called him to politics. After all, the only way to top shutting down the government is to try and run the government into the ground himself.

Earlier this month, Cruz released a short video that’s the best evidence yet for what a Cruz presidential campaign might be like. It’s called “A Time for Truth,” and the title has to be intentional irony.

Cruz’s Politifact track record for publicly-asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements they’ve looked at. The only other leading contender with higher rating is Ben Carson, who has a 100 percent “pants on fire” history, . . . .

One would expect a video entitled “A Time for Truth” to contain, you know, truth. Or calls to speak the truth, at the very least. Cruz’s infomercial, on the other hand, is simply a collection of Cruz clips wherein he apparently confuses speaking the truth with speaking very dramatically and forcefully. 

[T]elling whoppers show that Cruz isn’t just looking at different data, he’s living in a different universe.

That would explain Cruz’s misguided belief that a wide swath of Americans want to repeal Obamacare. It would explain his quixotic crusade against the country’s growing support for marriage equality. It would make sense, even, of his run for the Presidency.

Cruz, after all, is a “top-tier” candidate mostly in terms of name recognition. While he’s an extremely popular speaker at base-flaming events such as CPAC (where he won the easily gamed Straw Poll), wider swaths of GOP voters are not as kind. Even among the notoriously conservative Republican Iowa caucus-goers he’s in single digits.
Tell the truth, Ted Cruz says. Just don’t try to get him to be honest with himself.

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