Commentary

Getting to know the real Ted Cruz, an account from his close friend Jay Nordlinger

Leave a comment
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event

There was a three-part series in National Review which I found just fascinating, and a good antidote to the hit pieces you see from the Republican establishment, which they attack Cruz for “likability”. As regular readers of National Review know, Jay Nordlinger is more of an establishment type. But he backed Cruz from the beginning in the GOP primary, because he has known Cruz personally for a long time.

Here are the three parts:

From part 1:

I met Ted Cruz on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush in 2000. I had taken a leave of absence from NR to assist that campaign. This was in mid-September, for the last six or seven weeks of the campaign. […]Ted was a domestic-policy advisor on the campaign.

We bonded, as they say. We had many a late-night discussion at Earl Campbell’s barbecue joint and other choice spots.

On judges:

Ted had a fancy education. He went to Princeton University, where he was a debate champion, and to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor on several publications, including the Law Review.

But I noticed something on the campaign — the campaign in 2000: He had a scrappy, outsider’s heart.

More on his background: He clerked for Judge Mike Luttig, on the Fourth Circuit. In fact, Ted made me aware of Luttig, and I came to admire this judge almost as much as Ted did. Then Ted clerked for the chief justice of the United States: William Rehnquist.

In fact, I think Ted learned to play tennis just to play with the chief. I’ll have to check with Ted on that.

An additional note on Mike Luttig: When a Supreme Court seat came open in 2005, Ted pushed for Luttig’s nomination. So did I, in my capacity as an opinion journalist (not that I had great pull). When John Roberts got the nod, we supported this nomination, of course, as all conservatives did. But our heart was with Luttig.

I back Edith Hollan Jones and Janice Rogers Brown for Supreme Court picks, but J. Michael Luttig is on my list, further down.

On school choice:

Tell you a story. Ted was, and is, an impassioned advocate of school choice. He thinks it’s shocking — immoral — that poor kids are trapped in hopeless, violent schools. One day, he was telling me about lawyers in the opposite camp: the camp of the education establishment. (For once, I think the word “establishment” is appropriate. Or Bill Bennett’s word: “Blob.”)

“You could practically smell the sulfur coming off them,” said Ted.

I don’t have permission to tell that story. But what the hell. It’s done. (Ted can sue me!)

Promoting school choice is the civil rights issue of our time. We have to get the money out of the government, and back into the hands of parents, so that they are free to choose schools that serve their children, instead of indoctrinating their children. We need kids who can get private sector jobs, not recite global warming dogma and put condoms on cucumbers.

On the free enterprise system:

Ted was exceptionally versatile. He knew a lot about the law, of course. And about domestic policy, of course. He was a domestic-policy adviser. He had Medicare Part B and all that jazz down pat. I am still a little hazy about these things, never being able to get through a white paper. Even the abstract …

He knew a lot about economics, and was a big free-marketeer. When he was in high school, he took part in something called the Free Enterprise Institute. They read Hayek, Friedman, Bastiat, everything. Ted imbibed. And saw the reason of.

He knew a lot about foreign policy, and was a hawk. Also, he was a “social conservative.” That term is weak, but it will have to do. Ted opposed abortion, for example — and knew why.

This is important: Ted was amazingly free of cynicism. What do I mean by that? I mean, he reallybelieved in America, free enterprise, and all that rah-rah stuff. Other people feel the need to roll their eyes a bit. Not Ted.

Here’s something from part two, now:

Ted worked at the Justice Department and at the Federal Trade Commission. Then he was solicitor general of Texas (under the attorney general, Greg Abbott, who would become governor). Frankly, I didn’t know that states had solicitors general until Ted became one.

I blogged before about Ted’s experience pushing for free-market policies at the Federal Trade Commission, and for gun rights and religious liberty as Solicitor General of Texas. Everywhere he has gone, he has pushed conservative positions. If you were hiring a candidate and went strictly off of resume, this would be the guy you would hire. Trump would not get an interview – he has no resume.

Cruz’s record in the Senate:

Ted has a wider libertarian streak than I do. (Bill Buckley: “Within every conservative is a streak of libertarianism.”) Also, he has less patience for the “establishment” than I do. But, you know? He was the one who got elected, and you know what else? He kept his promises to the voters.

Some may not have liked those promises. But, by golly, he kept them. Which is refreshing in a politician.

And he did not sit around. Oh, no. He did not mark time. A senator observed, “Ted has done more in a couple of years here than some of our colleagues have done in decades.”

Cruz got a lot of legislation passed, more than Rubio.

And from the third part:

Obviously, the Cruz style is not for everyone. But I can say this, to conservatives (and to anyone else, for that matter): If he is president, he will do everything humanly possible to repeal Obamacare. And to prevent Iran from going nuclear. And to do other hard, vital things. I don’t know if these things can be done. But I feel sure that, if they can, Ted will do them. He will go the last mile, and beyond.

Like everyone else, he likes popularity more than unpopularity. But if popularity clashes with the right course of action, popularity will have to go. Ted is used to opposition and scorn. And he would do anything — walk through fire, chew on glass — to keep this country free.

You can read more about Cruz’s achievements in this post.

Related posts

News

How well is Obamacare working, and will Ted Cruz or Donald Trump fix health care?

1 Comment
Obamacare Bronze plans: and don't forget the $6850 deductibles
Obamacare Bronze plans

Two stories, then we’ll see whether Trump or Cruz is more likely to repeal Obamacare.

The Daily Signal lists 4 problems with Obamacare:

  1. Rising Costs
  2. Higher Taxes
  3. Unstable Enrollment
  4. Hostility to Personal Liberty

Let’s look at the first two:

Rising Costs

Contrary to repeated administration promises, Obamacare has not only failed to lower costs, but has also imposed additional expenses on millions of already over-stretched individuals and families.

Premiums in the government created exchanges were an initially jolting experience for Americans who did not qualify for taxpayer subsidies, and it appears that in 2016 premium increases in the government’s health insurance exchanges will again hit enrollees in the double digit range.

When it comes to average job-based premiums, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that they, too, are climbing, and will rise almost 60 percent between now and 2025. Deductibles in the Affordable Care Act exchanges have also jumped higher than officials anticipated, discouraging the purchase of the Obamacare coverage among the poor and the young.

[…]Today, based on CBO data, the net cost of Obamacare’s coverage provisions—subtracting the taxes and penalties—will amount to over $1.4 trillion over the next ten years.

Higher Taxes

Obama promised he would not raise taxes on the middle-class. But Congressional Budget Office data indicates that Obamacare’s numerous taxes, fees, and penalties will cost about $832 billion over the years 2016 – 2025. And middle-class Americans are going to be hit—directly and indirectly.

Even lower-income workers will get hit by Obamacare taxes, including the so-called Cadillac tax on expensive health plans offered by large firms, as well as the individual mandate tax penalty.

For 2016, that mandate tax penalty for a single adult is $695 and up to $2,085 for a family.

We also need to remember how many companies took their employees off of the full-time work week to keep them below the 30 hours, so that they wouldn’t have to buy them this expensive health care with all the new minimum coverages (drug addiction therapy coverage is mandatory now?) that raised the price of health care insurance premiums.

But there’s more than just more government spending, higher premiums, higher deductibles and higher tax penalties for those who opt out of the individual mandate. There’s also the regulation side of things. Doctors are now being regulated by the government to the point where they are dropping out of the field. And there are fewer people who want to become doctors, because of the regulations.

Primary care doctor shortage
Primary care doctor shortage

So, how do we fix it? Well, one person who will not fix it is Donald Trump. Trump isn’t aware of any of the problems with Obamacare – he wants to expand government control of health care. Make it cover more people, for more mandated coverages (toupees, wigs, Viagra, hair replacement surgery?)

When government pays for all the health care provisioning, we call that a single-payer system. And Trump is for it – that clip is from September 27, 2015. In the Fox News debate in August, he said that single payer health care “works in Canada“.

Do you think more government-control of health care will make things better? Look at how things are going in the single-payer system for our armed forces veterans in the VA single-payer system – they are dying while bureaucrats collect fat bonuses for concealing the waiting lists. Just as in Canada and the UK, the patients are dying on waiting lists while waiting for care. They pay into the Trump health care system their whole lives, then when they are old and of no use to the government, they are denied care and left to die.

Single-payer health care wait times in Canada
Single-payer health care wait times in Canada

How much do Canadians pay in taxes, in order to wait on waiting lists for the government to decide to give them health care?

This Toronto Sun article explains:

Canadians retain just 21% of their income after paying the taxman and covering the cost of necessities, according to a Fraser Institute study.

Taxes gobble up a whopping 42% of the average Canadian family’s income. About 37% of income goes to cover housing, food and clothing.

“We’ve found … that over the last five decades or so, the tax bill for the average Canadian family has grown dramatically,” said study coauthor Charles Lammam.

Well, what about Ted Cruz? Has he got any sort of plan for Obamacare and consumer-centered health care reform?

Ted Cruz

Yes, he’s going to repeal Obamacare on day one, and then work to replace it with this:

Main points:

Ted Cruz's health care plan: choice and competition
Ted Cruz’s health care plan: choice and competition

Cruz explains it himself here:

At the eighth Republican presidential primary debate on February 6, 2016, Ted Cruz discussed repealing Obamacare: “Socialized medicine is a disaster. It does not work. If you look at the countries that have imposed socialized medicine, that have put the government in charge of providing medicine, what inevitably happens is rationing. … If I’m elected president, we will repeal every word of Obamacare. And once we do that, we will adopt common sense reforms, number one, we’ll allow people to purchase health insurance across state lines that will drive down prices and expand the availability of low cost catastrophic insurance. We’ll expand health savings accounts; and we will de-link health insurance from employment so that you don’t lose your health insurance when you lose your job, and that way health insurance can be personal, portable and affordable and we keep government from getting in between us and our doctors.”

Those of you who like to read consumer-centered health care policy scholars like me (Sally C. Pipes, Regina Herzlinger, Michael D. Tanner, Michael F. Cannon, John C. Goodman, Ilya Shapiro, Avik Roy, etc.) will recognize a lot of what he is proposing – he stole it all from the conservative and libertarian policy experts.

To me, that sounds better than Trump’s plan of expanding government-run health care into universal government-run health care. If I wanted that, I’d go to Canada or the UK, and just die on a waiting list after paying 42% of my salary into the system for my whole working life.

News

UK woman explains why she chose a man who savagely attacked her

4 Comments
Is this man a good candidate for father/husband roles?
Is this man a good candidate for father/husband roles?

Trina sent me this astonishing post about a woman whose boyfriend literally gouged her eyes out. The article is written by one of my favorite authors, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. It appears in City Journal, the famous journal of the centrist Manhattan Institute.

There are no graphic images in the article, but there is very vulgar and violent language in some parts. The author of the article is sympathetic with her suffering, but we can learn a lot from her story about how to choose a good man.

Fatherless

First, we learn that Ms. Nash grew up fatherless and the bills were paid by the state – she had no idea that women should prefer men who work hard, self-sacrificially, to be able to provide for a family:

Nash was born in Cornwall, one of six children to a mother whose relationships with men were tumultuous. “I’d seen my mum go through hundreds of break-ups and be badly treated by men,” she tells us. The mother’s complex love life left little time for her children, for, as Nash observes, “I was much closer to [my grandmother] than my mum, who never seemed to have time for us.” How many of the six children shared the same father we never learn, and indeed Nash makes no mention of a father of any of them, including her own. It appears that she came into a radically fatherless world, and though she does not say so, it is likely that at least some of her brothers and sisters were half-siblings; and again, though she does not say so, it is likely that the principal economic support of the family was the state, whose paid-out benefits meant that it was, in effect, father to the children. Nash grew up in public housing and seems to have lived in such subsidized housing all her life.

Not seeing her father providing for the family and loving her mother left her with no way to tell good men apart from bad men:

She tells us early in the book that she is a single mother of two children. Speaking of her first child, she says, “I may have had [him] when I was very young but my kids mean the world to me and not for one moment did I regret becoming a mum at sixteen.”

[…]The next sentence reads: “My choice in men, however, left a lot to be desired.” And when she reaches the beginning of the narrative of her blinding, she writes, “I had [moved back to my town of birth] with two sons by different dads and a series of dead-end relationships.” It is obvious that the suitability of men to be fathers to her children arose for her neither before nor after their births, because she deemed fathers inessential or even useless, as economically they obviously were, given her likely financial support from the state. That is why her choice in men “left a lot to be desired”: nothing of long-term significance for her hung on it, or seemed to hang on it, so that the only criterion of choice was immediate attraction—commonly known as lust. 

This is the problem with feminism that I am always warning you all about. If women are taught that there are no specific behaviors that men are responsible for, (because that’s sexist), then they will prefer men solely on surface  criteria like appearance, feelings and peer-approval. They will not choose men who can actually do the jobs that men do: protect, provide, lead on moral and spiritual issues.

Alcohol

Drinking too much contributed to her poor choices with men:

We arrive now at her choice of Jenkin as consort. As it happened, Nash had met him at a party some years previously, just following his release from prison after serving four and a half years “for stomping on a guy’s head and giving him brain damage,” as her best friend put it—adding that “he’s a bloody psycho.” And Nash’s first experience of him was not altogether favorable: after they spent hours talking about music and “our mutual love of rapper 2pac,” he tried to force himself sexually upon her. It was not love at first sight, therefore: it was love at second sight.

That second sight came when “I’d had a few glasses of wine” at a restaurant and a “few shots of tequila” at a nightclub, where she ran into him again, so that she “could barely hear in my head those words of warning [about Jenkin by her best friend years earlier] for all the alcohol I had knocked back.”

[…]When he asked for her telephone number, “I didn’t hesitate for a second. I felt I could trust him.”

She felt (feelings) that she could trust him. But there was no evidence that he could be a good father and husband.

Lust

So, why did she feel she could trust him?

What was so attractive about Jenkin? It was his size and muscles. He was six feet, four inches tall, and “his chest was so big his T-shirt clung to him like cellophane, highlighting his pectoral muscles. His blue jeans molded to his thighs, showing off his pert bum.” Nash’s subsequent rationalizations for staying with him were but a smokescreen for the rawness of her desire.

[…]But Jenkin struck Nash as a “great big teddy bear” with “puppy-dog eyes.” On waking up after her first night of sex with him, however, she noticed the tattoos on his chest and arms: “Down his right arm was an image of a hooded executioner raising his sword like he was about to slaughter someone. . . . On his left chest was a tattoo of a tiger ripping someone’s head off. Down his left arm was OUTLAW in big bold black letters.” Still, though she knew he had served a long prison sentence for seriously injuring someone, she “chuckled at the thought that Shane fancied himself as a bit of an outlaw.” His night of love with her resulted in him failing to get up in the morning, whereupon he lost his job as a painter and decorator, and he never found, or sought, another.

No woman who believed in traditional gender roles could ever think that this man would make a good husband. He is unemployed, unchaste, a convicted violent criminal, a drunkard and a brute.

Violence

The article then talks for a while about the drinking, partying and domestic violence between Nash and Jenkin. He accuses her of cheating, spits in her face repeatedly, throws a brick through her car window.

There were plenty of signs:

Jenkin exhibits almost every conceivable warning sign of vicious future violence. He takes anabolic steroids. He arrives one day with a crossbow—a formidable weapon—claiming that some Lithuanians with whom he has had a dispute want to kill him. He spends his days playing violent video games and his nights watching horror films of terrible sadism, including some that graphically depict people having their eyes gouged out with bare hands—scenes that obviously excite him and that he demands Nash watch with him. Nash learns that Jenkin had stabbed his own dog to death—a Rottweiler, needless to say—when he grew tired of it.

Jenkin actually attacked her before the eyes were gouged out. And she lied in court saying he was innocent and that she fallen down the stairs. And she took him back after he was acquitted of the first attack. The second time he attacked, it cost her her eyes. And all was done in front of her children.

The article ends with this:

In her book, Tina Nash describes how she tried bravely to get on with life after being blinded. After she finished the book, she found a new boyfriend. He has just been sent to prison for assaulting her.

Here’s a news story about the new boyfriend.

The point of me posting this is as a warning to those who believe that there are no differences between men and women – no specific things that men are supposed to do for a woman that she should choose him for. A man has to be able to work in order to provide. He should be protective and gentle with women, children and animals. He should be loving and caring. He should know God and be prepared to defend God. He should have strong convictions about theology and the moral law.

A woman learns about the qualities of good men by reading stories about good men, e.g. – Austen, Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, etc., and also from watching her father be a protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader in the home. It is very important that her father perform the standard male roles for her mother in front of her. That’s how daughters learn what it means to be a good man, and how men are supposed to love women well. It doesn’t mean letting a woman be spoiled and selfish all the time. But she should always feel safe and loved, no matter what she does.

By the way, you can read Dalrymple’s first book for free online. All the chapters are linked in this post.