No news to us DUers about Carnival CRUZ but David BROOKS does a great takedown of him

[UTUSN]

Not that it will reach wingnuts, since they despise BROOKS as being RINO and way soft.

********QUOTE*******

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/opinion/the-brutalism-of-ted-cruz.html?ref=yfp&_r=0
[font size=5]The Brutalism of Ted Cruz[/font]
David BROOKS

.... Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

Some justices were skeptical. “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” Justice Anthony Kennedy asked. The court system did finally let Haley out of prison, after six years.

The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy. ....

But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

Cruz lays down an atmosphere of apocalyptic fear. America is heading off “the cliff to oblivion.” After one Democratic debate he said, “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away every day, and last night was an audition for who would wear the jackboot most vigorously.”

As the Republican strategist Curt Anderson observed in Politico, there’s no variation in Cruz’s rhetorical tone. As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everything is described as a maximum existential threat. ....


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[Hekate]

1. We watch David Brooks on Friday on PBS. He's good. He's also completely appalled at his party. nt

[UTUSN]

2. That's why his wingnuts hate him. So, who's his audience?!1

What he says is what we Lefties already know and his own people reject him. So...

[Hekate]

4. Do you ever watch the news and commentary on PBS? It's really quite good. A variety of thoughtful...

...opinions are presented by thoughtful people who don't yell at each other. Friday evening is when you get the Mark Shields and David Brooks with each other.

I don't always agree with any of them (in fact, I treasure Molly Ivin's description of him as "the Spaniel-eyed David Brooks&quot , but they are intelligent -- and did I mention they don't yell at each other?

[Hekate]

3. More from the article...

David Brooks is a conservative of the old type, and a Jew. He's got nothing against evangelicals per se (see last paragraph) and acknowledges their historical contributions to America (which are quite real, but I won't go into it here), but Cruz is something else again. "Tribal blood-and-soil European conservatism" is what brought us centuries of persecution of Christian orthodoxy against a whole variety of Christian sects, Christian persecution of Jews, and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust. Serb against Croat was nothing new, and on and on in the blood-soaked European soil.

As is the wont of inauthentic speakers, everything is described as a maximum existential threat.

The fact is this apocalyptic diagnosis is ridiculous. The Obama administration has done things people like me strongly disagree with. But America is in better economic shape than any other major nation on earth. Crime is down. Abortion rates are down. Fourteen million new jobs have been created in five years.
>snip<
But Cruz manufactures an atmosphere of menace in which there is no room for compassion, for moderation, for anything but dismantling and counterattack. And that is what he offers. Cruz’s programmatic agenda, to the extent that it exists in his speeches, is to destroy things: destroy the I.R.S., crush the “jackals” of the E.P.A., end funding for Planned Parenthood, reverse Obama’s executive orders, make the desert glow in Syria, destroy the Iran nuclear accord.
>snip<
The best conservatism balances support for free markets with a Judeo-Christian spirit of charity, compassion and solidarity. Cruz replaces this spirit with Spartan belligerence. He sows bitterness, influences his followers to lose all sense of proportion and teaches them to answer hate with hate. This Trump-Cruz conservatism looks more like tribal, blood and soil European conservatism than the pluralistic American kind.

Evangelicals and other conservatives have had their best influence on American politics when they have proceeded in a spirit of personalism — when they have answered hostility with service and emphasized the infinite dignity of each person. They have won elections as happy and hopeful warriors. Ted Cruz’s brutal, fear-driven, apocalypse-based approach is the antithesis of that.

[DhhD]

6. Cruz told a religious audience that his father deserted him and his mother, in Canada.

IMO, he has behavioral pathologies. Cruz is a well known liar.

[Hekate]

7. Oh yeah. Cruz is a hard-right sociopath and a species of loathesome slime.

The traditional GOP power brokers correctly fear Cruz even more than Trump, and both of them are scarier than anything I've seen in awhile.

[Johonny]

5. The morning answer people were burying poor David this morning

Along the way they were proving compassionate conservationism is a lie. There is no compassion in the GOP. I love watching conservatives eat their own.