Ted Cruz belatedly realizes that you can’t call the participants in the Capitol protests “terrorists” without pissing off a lot potential voters. From Steve Watson at summit.news:
Tucker Carlson tells Cruz he’s “not buying it”

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Ted Cruz belatedly realizes that you can’t call the participants in the Capitol protests “terrorists” without pissing off a lot potential voters. From Steve Watson at summit.news:
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Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Politics
Tagged January 6 protest, Ted Cruz, Tucker Carlson
From Karl Denninger on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
Oh c’mon Ted, you can do better than that.
I want to be crystal clear: these attacks are garbage. For Donald J. Trumpto enlist his friends at the National Enquirer and his political henchmen to do his bidding shows you that there is no low Donald won’t go.
These smears are completely false, they’re offensive to Heidi and me, they’re offensive to our daughters, and they’re offensive to everyone Donald continues to personally attack.
Donald Trump’s consistently disgraceful behavior is beneath the office we are seeking and we are not going to follow.
So let me see if I get this right.
First, you didn’t post a denial of the allegations — just that the “attacks” are alleged “garbage.” You’re a lawyer; you know damn well what you’re doing in that regard. Note that nowhere is the sentence “I have not engaged in any form of sexual contact with anyone other than my wife since we were married.” Why not?
Second, a SuperPac that supports you posted a (presumably stolen) image from GQ featuring, allegedly, Trump’s wife. It was targeted at Mormon women through your nice little “data mining” game in Utah. (Oh, and if that image wasn’t stolen but rather was purchased then it gets quite a bit more interesting because the transaction is a business record and can be subpoenaed, should anyone — like the FEC — care to do so.)
When called on it by Trump you said “that wasn’t me” — but didn’t disavow the PAC or the ad.
Now, a third party tabloid, which Trump does not own or control in any way, runs a story alleging you’ve had five affairs, including one with a hooker. This tabloid, I remind you, has a history of being right when it comes to political sex scandals, in that they nailed Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart and more.
To continue reading: Cruz…You And Your Family Are A Disgrace
Imaginative, albeit sure to never be acted upon, proposals from David Stockman at davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
It’s actually pretty easy. At an apt moment very soon, Trump should offer Governor Kasich the VP slot and Senator Cruz the vacant Supreme Court seat.
Such a grand bargain would not only clear the primary field and quash any backroom hijacking of the nomination by the Washington GOP establishment; it would also permit each man to play his highest and best role at this great inflection point in the nation’s history.
That is, Donald Trump’s job is to destroy the Republican/Neocon establishment and bring working class America back into a modern version of a McKinley-style Republican Party. Ted Cruz’ task is to spend a lifetime bringing strict constructionism back to the high court, thereby helping to restore constitutional restraints on a leviathan state that fundamentally threatens personal liberty and economic freedom and prosperity in America.
And, yes, there really isn’t much for a washed-out, me-too Republican pol like Kasich to do at all. Except to get out of the way and exercise his apparent talent for preacherly uplift as America’s eulogist-in-chief at foreign state funerals.
Beyond the rightness of it, there’s some pretty potent logic for the politics of the deal, too, There would be lots of of winners all around—–most especially the long-suffering American people.
Mitch McConnell and his rudderless Senate wheels, for example, would not need even a ten minute caucus to hand down to young Ted Cruz a life sentence to the Supreme Court.
At the same time and more importantly, however, the American public would score a twofer——a more faithful high court and one less warmonger on Capitol Hill.
As to the former, Ted Cruz is about as close to the next Antonin Scalia as exists in America today. It goes without saying that he could do far more for the cause of liberty as a Justice than as a gadfly Senator.
But there is an angle even more important. Cruz was a top student and debater at Princeton, a distinguished editor of the Harvard Law Review and a clerk on both the DC Court of Appeals and for the great Justice William Rehnquist on the Supreme Court. During the primary debates, he erudition on constitutional matters towered far above the pack.
He was also described as “off the charts brilliant” by no less an admirer of his own brilliance than Alan Dershowitz. With a prospective long lifetime of service on the high court, Ted Cruz could bring a level of scholarly narrative and intellectual passion and acumen that is sorely needed by the constitutionalist cause.
At the same time, the American people would be spared of another bellicose politician hell-bent on extending Washington’s imperial depredations. Cruz seems to have the Ronald Reagan disease. That is, his belief in small government does not extend to the Pentagon side of the Potomac; and his high regard for liberty does not appear to encompass innocent foreigners dwelling in the vicinity of desert sands he would cause to glow in the dark.
As for Kasich, it is hard to think of a more inapt messenger with a more wrong-headed message. America does not need another compromiser, reconciler and wizened Washington ranch hand who can split the difference.
It needs, instead, a force of nature who can rain shock and awe on the Imperial City. And, so doing, overturn its vast network of prosperous racketeers who feed off the military industrial complex, the health care cartel, the education monopolies, the Wall Street and banking mafias and the legions of other crony capitalist rackets.
To continue reading: Toward A Grand New Bargain: How Donald Trump Can Clear The Field And Realign American Politics
Posted in Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy, Government, Law, Politics
Tagged Donald Trump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz
From Karl Denninger, on a guest post at theburningplatform.com:
Last night was quite-amusing. I met a friend for a brewski and managed to get home in time to catch nearly all of it.
You have to sit back with amazement at the complicity of the media in going along with whatever political winds certain parts of a party wish to unfurl their sails into. In this case it was “Rubio and Cruz attack Trump” night, an agenda that those two candidates declared but the moderators did not have to oblige, ignoring (for the most part) Kascich and Carson while giving all the questions to the other three.
They did, however, so-oblige, which simply underlines that these are not “debates” at all.
A debate, my friends, is not driven by the agendas of the participants. The moderator(s) are supposed to be neutral parties and debates are conducted under fairly-specific and formal sets of rules — something that never happens in the political sphere, but if you ever actually participated in the scholarly version of a debate you know how they work.
The result was that Kascich and Carson might as well not have showed up; they were really just ornaments on the stage. Maybe that’s appropriate given their poll numbers and maybe not, but if you’re going to do that then don’t invite them at all, instead of pretending that they’re participants. I suppose there was some value there in that Carson refused to defend his participation, and if you can’t do that then what are you doing on the national stage? Kascish at least tried. In short it’s time for Ben Carson to go home; he simply never had the stomach for either the fight or the job, and while both were obvious from the outset there’s a point at which it becomes painful to watch. We’re there.
Kascich is being beaten, badly, and will probably lose Ohio. At that point he’s done and will probably mortally wound himself as a governor too. Good; he has it coming.
Now on to Rubio, Cruz and Trump.
To continue reading: The 10th Inning
From Sheldon Richman at antiwar.com:
I see no point splitting hairs over whether Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio is the more egregious warmonger. Both love the bloody and costly U.S. empire. Both believe in American exceptionalism. (Rubio arrogantly calls for a “New American Century.”) Both want to make war in the Middle East (and beyond) and “stand behind Israel,” though such policies provoked the 9/11 attacks. Both want to pour money into the military, as though America were militarily threatened. (The US military budget equals the budgets of the next seven highest spending nations.) Both want to prevent détente with Iran, which poses no danger. Both hype terrorism as an existential threat. Both want the government to spy on Americans, especially Muslim Americans. Both want to “control the border,” code for violating the natural right of people to move freely and make better lives without government permission.
On the Middle East, admittedly, we see a difference. Rubio, having learned nothing from the Iraq and Libya interventions, would overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while also attacking the Islamic State. Cruz, to his credit, realizes that regime-change would leave Syria in the hands of bin Ladenites or worse, so he’d “carpet bomb” ISIS only. Thus Rubio toes the neoconservative line more faithfully. The neocons, who front for Israel’s ruling interests, want Assad ousted because he’s an ally of Iran and weakening Iran is the priority. After all, without this manufactured threat, how could Israel continue, with America’s blessing, to crush the Palestinians’ independence aspirations or have its way in southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights?
But this difference between Rubio and Cruz should not be exaggerated. Cruz’s website declares he would be all-in for Israel: “We must make clear to the world that the U.S.-Israel alliance is once again a strategic bedrock for the United States. America’s security is significantly enhanced by a strong Israel. Israel has been, is, and always will be the Middle East bulwark in defense of the West. Our American-Israeli alliance is something to celebrate.” Rubio agrees.
To continue reading: Cruz and Rubio: Heirs to Bush-Obama Militarism
Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Imperialism, Military, Politics
Tagged Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz
From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.org:
The War Party holds on, but for how much longer?
The good news for anti-interventionists out of Iowa is that Bernie Sanders has defied the conventional wisdom and effectively delayed the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton. In spite of a ramped up effort to isolate the Vermont socialist from the Democratic mainstream, Hillary is in for a bruising fight that will only get bloodier when Sanders smashes her in New Hampshire, as seems likely.
On the Republican side of the aisle, the news from Iowa is decidedly mixed. There are glad tidings in the fact that the two candidates not wholly-owned subsidiaries of the neocons came in first (Cruz) and second (Trump). Yet the unexpectedly strong third place finish by the War Twink Marco Rubio has the War Party celebrating. Not that we didn’t know Rubio was going to come in third all along: that’s what the polls told us, and they were right. Yet we were being primed in the run up to the actual balloting with the narrative that third place was actually a “victory” for the Cuban Bombshell. And we have the “mainstream” media chiming in with the usual neocon suspects when it comes to pushing this line.
Ideologically, Rubio is the perfect neocon vehicle. He is not only opposed to the Iran deal, he has also suggested war with Tehran is practically inevitable. He avers that we should’ve been arming the Syrian Islamist rebels from the very beginning, a view he shares with Hillary Clinton. He has run ads complaining that the US spies on Israel – but hasn’t said a word about extensive Israeli spying on the US. He wants to add $1 trillion to the military budget: he wants to shoot down Russian aircraft over Syria and confront Moscow in Ukraine. And his dog whistle to the neocons is his campaign theme: he touts “a new American century,” limning the battle-flag of the old Project for a New American Century that did so much to give us the invasion of Iraq.
The Rubio campaign, in essence, is the GOP Establishment’s last stand against the roiling tides of populist backlash that threaten to bring it down. Which is why the donor class is rapidly moving into Rubio’s camp. The Cruz campaign is an attempt to straddle the fence: while the Canadian-born Senator has been critical of the neocons, he’s such a consummate opportunist that he isn’t above placating them as long as he gains some political benefit. And his foreign policy stance contains elements of neoconservatism, as well as a somewhat attenuated realism. Trump, as this perceptive piece on his foreign policy team makes clear, is an unambiguous realist, which is why the neocons have pulled out all the stops in their effort to derail the Trump Train.
To continue reading: The Establishment’s Last Stand
Posted in Government, Money, Politics
Tagged 2016 election, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz
From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:
Whoever wins the nominations, the most successful campaigns of 2016 provide us with a clear picture of where the center of gravity is today in both parties and, hence, where America is going.
Bernie Sanders, with his mammoth crowds and mass support among the young, represents, as did George McGovern in 1972, despite his defeat, the future of the Democratic Party.
That Hillary Clinton has been tacking left tells you Sanders is winning the argument. Should she avoid indictment in the email scandal, and win the nomination and the election, Clinton would be a placeholder president.
Yet, should Sanders win the nomination and election — highly improbable — he would become a frustrated and a failed president.
Why? Consider what he has on offer.
Free college tuition and universal health care, a breakup of the big banks and a reform of the tax code to make the Fortune 500 and the millionaires and billionaires pay for it all. Soak the rich!
Sound socialist economics, but this is the formula that turned Puerto Rico and Illinois into the booming showcases they are today. Moreover, unless Sanders swept both houses of Congress and won a 67-vote, veto-proof majority in the Senate, his agenda would be dead on arrival on Capitol Hill.
Yet there are areas where the Sanders agenda overlaps that of Donald Trump and other Republican candidates. Bernie is an anti-interventionist, anti-nation-building, anti-empire leftist of a breed common in the Labor Party after World War II, when the British Empire was liquidated, Churchill notwithstanding.
Moreover, Sanders is no free-trade globalist of the Davos school. He opposed NAFTA, GATT and MFN for China. Like Trump, he backs a trade policy that puts American workers first.
Thus, on both trade and foreign policy, there is common ground between the rebellions in the Democratic and Republican parties, even as Clinton has ideological allies among the GOP free-traders and neocons of the Bush I and II presidencies.
But while difficult to see how Sanders captures the nomination and wins in November, the rebellion in the GOP is larger, stronger and deeper. In every national or state poll, anti-establishment candidates command a majority of Republican voters. Which presents a problem for the establishment.
The Beltway elites may succeed in blocking Trump or Ted Cruz. But the eventual nominee and the party will have to respect and to some degree accommodate the agendas of the rebellion on immigration, border security, trade and anti-intervention, or face a fatal split.
To continue reading: Is a New Era Upon Us?
Posted in Government, History, Politics
Tagged Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz