How can Ted Cruz face his children?
by digby
This was pretty good:
WATCH: @SenTedCruz says he believes Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election. #MTP #IfItsSunday pic.twitter.com/OPAxpe6T6t— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) December 8, 2019
I expect nothing from Ted Cruz. He is clearly an empty vessel, with a yawning void where his heart and soul should be. There is nothing new there.
What is new is that Chuck Todd was able to best him by forcing him to more or less admit that he’s a sniveling coward for defending the indefensible from the same man who humiliated him repeatedly in the 2016 campaign.
There was a time when Cruz said otherwise, but we now know that he doesn’t really care about his wife or family and he was just pretending in order to win:
Trump went further, of course:
If you look at the following “report” from 2016 you can see how the press trivialized this stuff. While they were wanking daily about Clinton’s emails, this was how they treated Trump’s character assassination tactics.
Look where we are today.
I carry no brief for Cruz, obviously. But I defy anyone to be able to successfully parry these kinds of attacks when the media treats it all like a big joke. It seems that they are less likely to indulge this nonsense this time but I’m not confident. These “spats” are a sugar rush for the press and I will be surprised if they don’t revert.
By the way, Cruz said this around the time of the convention and at the time I wondered if he saw an opportunity to be the clear alternative to Trump. But like all of them he fell in line almost immediately and has been one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders, contrary to everything he pretended to believe in his entire political career.
I’m sure if Trump is defeated he and the others will return to their previous “principles” and try to pretend their servile Trump boot-licking never happened.
I think I fear this most of all because the next guy they put in the White House will not be the ignoramus Trump is — and he will know that you can get away with anything you are bold enough to try. The congress has been revealed as a paper tiger as an institution — it is only as powerful as a Senate super-majority, which almost never happens. The courts have been packed. If you have no shame and are happy to exploit this post-modern, epistemological nihilism, tens of millions of people yelling madly from the sidelines won’t bother you at all.
Don’t think President Tom Cotton won’t take it to the limit.
Update: By the way, in case you’ve forgotten about the Melania cover-shot brouhaha, there was a fact-check.
The truth is that Melania did a lot of provocative photo-shoots, which is fine in my book. But you can’t blame Trump’s rivals for thinking that might be a deal breaker to the right-wing moral scolds who’ve been dominating politics for a couple of decades. The Access Hollywood tape flushed that idea once and for all. However, I think we would be mistaken to believe they won’t revert to that as well.
And when we all scream “BUT DONALD TRUMP!!!!” they will laugh in our faces.
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