Tag Archives: Marco Rubio

News

Contrasting Ted Cruz’s flaw with Marco Rubio’s flaw

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Ted Cruz vs Marco Rubio
Marco Rubio vs Ted Cruz: the fatal flaws

This article from Asia Times was sent to me by my friend Patrick, and I really loved it. The article finds what’s wrong with each of the candidates, and I agree with their assessment.

First Ted Cruz.

I guess I’ve said before that I disagree with Cruz on foreign policy. His record shows that he opposed data collection on Americans to toughen up national security, and that he opposed the interventions in Libya, Egypt and Syria.

Here’s the excerpt:

Cruz first drew the wrath of the Establishment in the fall of 2014 when he averred that the US had stayed too long in Iraq, adding that the US should not try to turn Iraq into Switzerland. That is not merely heresy, but an existential threat to an Establishment that went all in on the Bush Freedom Agenda, up through and including the abortive, misnomered “Arab Spring.” Americans forgive a lot, but they don’t easily forgive a leadership that sends American soldiers into harm’s way on behalf of a failed social experiment.

Yes. All true. I don’t agree with Cruz on most of those views. I wanted us to stay the course in Afghanistan and Iraq. I didn’t want us in Libya or Egypt, but I wanted us to invade Syria after they crossed the red line and to stay there as long as it took to get Iranian influence out. I want our armed forces to destroy regimes that harbor terrorists and stay over there, even if we don’t engage in nation-building. Also, I am all for warrant-less aggregate data collection and enhanced interrogation techniques. Now, I think I’m in the minority there, and more people agree with Cruz’s libertarian streak, but I’m a hawk. I believing in projecting American power against our enemies.

I sent this post to Lindsay for validation, and she said that Cruz voted for expanding gathering information through cell phones and other communication, but no searches without a warrant. Cruz is a stickler for the Constitution, that’s why he opposes warrant-less searches, but I don’t think of aggregate data collection as a warrant-less search. To me, you gather the data, and then you restrict searches on it to specific numbers that you have a warrant for – but you gather the data first, so that it’s there for you to search on it.

Now the author also says that “it is likely that Cruz would try to widen the gap between America’s military technology and the rest of the world’s.” And that’s correct. Cruz would do that. So I’m not in complete disagreement with him, only the things I said.

Now Marco Rubio.

OK, now, I’ve blogged before about Marco Rubio’s mistakes:

And in addition to that, I found two more this week. Marco Rubio also supports sugar subsidies, which is just crony capitalism. And he got a D rating from pro-marriage activist Maggie Gallagher regarding his response to the Obergefell decision, which redefined marriage for all 50 states. (Cruz opposes all subsidies, e.g. – ethanol, and he got an A- rating on his response to the gay marriage Supreme Court decision).

The article explains the common thread in all 8 of these mistakes by Rubio.

It says:

Endearing, boyish, photogenic and eloquent, Marco Rubio is the candidate that Central Casting sent the Establishment from the studio pool. Rubio, a middling student at university and a Florida machine politician throughout his career, says his lines well but does not have an original thought about foreign policy. That is why the Establishment likes him. Cruz knows that the Establishment is naked, and is willing to say so. That’s why they don’t like him. They aren’t supposed to. They look at him the way a rice bowl looks at a hammer.

Marco Rubio just allows himself to get swept up in fashionable causes, and that’s why he bands together with Democrats on their priorities so often.

This quotation from a recent Matt Walsh column hits the nail on the head about why some people prefer Rubio to Cruz:

People say Ted Cruz is awkward, boring, weird looking, and lacks any semblance of style or charm. And they’re right. I agree with those observations. The guy is a total bummer on a personality level. If we were in fifth grade I probably wouldn’t invite him to my sleepover.

Rubio supporters dismiss the items in my list of Rubio failures with a shrug. Who cares, they say. They want to make the decision about who should be President as if they were having a sleepover. Who should I invite? I’ll invite the guy isn’t much smarter than me, and who goes along with me, when I want to be mischievous. Not that Ted Cruz, he went to Princeton and Harvard Law, and clerked for Justice J. Michael Luttig and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He was Solicitor General of Texas, and argued and won cases that defended conservative causes at the Supreme Court – when it was majority liberal. He’s too stuck-up, successful and strict  for my sleepover. He worries too much about the Constitution and doing the right thing, and will never have any fun if it means breaking the rules. I’m voting for Rubio to come to my sleepover! Fun and thrills!

So, this is the core problem with Marco Rubio, and it explains why the establishment loves him. He has average intelligence, and limited accomplishments. He draws opinions from the people around him, and is driven by peer-pressure and media acclaim to act against conservative interests. That’s why he sides with Democrats on issues like amnesty, Libya, campus due process, gay marriage, etc. It’s popular, and Rubio does what the cool kids want him to do.

But we’re not picking a kid to come to our sleepover, America. We’re picking the President of the United States. I think Rubio would make a great Vice President under President Cruz, and then he can run for President again in 2024.

News

CNN was the first to run the story about Ben Carson’s retreat to Florida

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Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?
Why do people think that CNN are biased leftist clowns?

I didn’t want to write about this, but one of my Democrat co-workers who is always pestering me with any misstep by my favorite candidates (Jindal, Walker, Cruz) brought it up. I doubt he knows what the national debt is, but he is always very aware of all the latest nit-picky issues. Anyway, here we go with the post I did not want to write, and thanks to my friend Kris (who is not my evil co-worker) for encouraging me to write it.

So everyone knows the story. A staffer on the Cruz campaign sent out a message saying that Carson was going to be returning to Florida and skipping New Hampshire and South Carolina. The staffer forwarded this message to Cruz caucus-goers, and they used it to appeal to Carson supporters to vote for Cruz. So where did the story originate? Did the nasty Cruz campaign make it up?

No, it came from CNN.

Here’s the post from Breitbart News containing the timeline, with screenshots of CNN tweets and videos of CNN anchors.

Breitbart says this:

The following is a definitive timeline of events on Monday night. All times are local Iowa time–i.e. Central Standard Time (CST).

6:41-6:43 p.m. CNN’s Chris Moody tweets news about Ben Carson (three tweets)

The part we care about is this:

CNN's Chris Moody starts the story
CNN Senior Reporter Chris Moody starts the story at 6:43 Central / 7:43 Eastern

No word about where the story came from, but the source seems to be Ben Carson, or someone representing his campaign. How else would Chris Moody get this information except from the campaign itself? And that would mean that Carson, who has never run for office before and has a disorganized campaign, just made a mistake. Or someone on his campaign staff did.

Anyway, at 6:44 PM Iowa local time, CNN anchors ran with the story next, based on the tweet of their “Senior Reporter”:

And here’s the transcript:

Tapper: Thanks, Wolf. Well, CNN has learned some news about the man who, at least according to polls, is in fourth place here in Iowa. Now, Dana, a week from tomorrow, we’re all going to be doing this again for the New Hampshire primary. So almost every single candidate is going to be going directly from here to New Hampshire to campaign–except for the man in fourth place, who a few months ago was in first place here, Dr. Ben Carson. What have we learned?

Bash: That’s right. We should say that our Chris Moody is breaking this news, that Ben Carson is going to go back to Florida, to his home, regardless of how he does tonight here in Iowa. He’s going to go there for several days. And then afterwards, he’s not going to go to South Carolina. He’s not going to go to New Hampshire. He’s going to come to Washington, D.C., and he’s going to do that because the National Prayer Breakfast is on Thursday. And people who have been following Ben Carson’s career know that that’s really where he got himself on the political map, attending that prayer breakfast, and really giving it to President Obama at the time. And he became kind of a hero among conservatives, among evangelicals especially.

Tapper: But it’s very unusual–

Bash: Very unusual.

Tapper: –to be announcing that you’re going to go home to rest for a few days, not going on to the next site. Plus, he’s already announced that he’s going to be coming out and speaking at 9:15 local and 10:15 Eastern, no matter whether or not we know the results, because he wants to get home and get ahead of the storm.

Bash: Look, if you want to be President of the United States, you don’t go home to Florida. I mean, that’s bottom line. That’s the end of the story. If you want to signal to your supporters that you want it, that you’re hungry for it, that you want them to get out and and campaign, you’ve got to be out there doing it too. And he’s not doing it. it’s very unusual.

Tapper: Very unusual news that CNN has just learned. CNN’s Chris Moody breaking the story. Wolf, back to you in Washington.

This was reported 16 minutes before the caucuses began. There is a ticker in the CNN video above. This was the origin of the story. The story did not originate with the Cruz campaign, it originated with the radical leftists on CNN.

Carson later tweeted that he was NOT suspending his campaign, that he was going home to Florida to “get fresh clothes”. Oh yes, I always fly home to get fresh clothes. It is just a ridiculous thing to say. It is not at all clear that the Cruz or Rubio campaigns SAW this tweet, which happened at 6:53 PM – their e-mail to their campaign workers came out a mere three minutes later.

In any case, at 6:56  PM, the Cruz campaign e-mails supporters what was reported on CNN, that Carson was “taking time off from the campaign trail”.

So, that’s how it went down, and as you can see, Cruz is innocent, and so is his staff. The guilty party is CNN for running the story that Carson had to correct for them. But before CNN could correct their mistake, the Cruz campaign had already acted on the CNN story. CNN didn’t even try to correct the story until after the Cruz campaign had sent out their messages. CNN did clarify their initial report, but much much later, around 7:30 PM. And this 7:30 PM tweet was the FIRST clarification that the Cruz campaign saw.

By the way, the only report that I have seen about the source of the rumor reported by CNN links the rumor to the MARCO RUBIO campaign, and you can read about that here. The tweet from the Rubio supporter has since been deleted, but the screenshot survives in the post I linked above.

Finally, one last thing. Cruz, being the man who stood up to big ethanol in Iowa and won, has already proved his integrity and character. But there’s more. The most obvious thing to do in the face of a made-up scandal like this is to pick a low-level staffer and punish them. But Cruz looked at the facts that I wrote above, and decided to stick by his staffer. This man always does the right thing – it’s like he doesn’t even care what happens to his whole campaign so long as he does the moral thing. And this is being noticed. Here is a post by a Trump supporter who switched his vote to Cruz, based on Cruz’s decision to stand by his innocent campaign staff.

If you like honor, Ted Cruz is your guy. I’m not going to regret supporting this guy.

News

Marco Rubio co-sponsored a bill to remove due process for accused college students

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Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain
Marco Rubio with his allies: Democrat Churck Schumer and RINO John McCain

This is just shocking – it turns out that Marco Rubio supports a bill to presume that college students who are accused of rape are treated as guilty before any police involvement or any criminal trial.

National Review explains:

When it comes to due process on campus, Republicans in Congress, who campaigned on vows to rein in the Obama administration’s abuses of executive power, have largely acquiesced in its bureaucratic imposition of quasi-judicial tyranny. For more than four years, the White House and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have used an implausible reinterpretation of a 1972 civil-rights law to impose mandates unimagined by the law’s sponsors. It has forced almost all of the nation’s universities and colleges to disregard due process in disciplinary proceedings when they involve allegations of sexual assault. Enforced by officials far outside the mainstream, these mandates are having a devastating impact on the nation’s universities and on the lives of dozens — almost certainly soon to be hundreds or thousands — of falsely accused students.

One might have expected an aggressive response by House Republicans to such gross abuses of power — including subpoenas, tough oversight hearings, and corrective legislation. Instead, most of them have been mute. In the Senate, meanwhile, presidential candidate Marco Rubio of Florida, Judiciary Committee chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa, and rising star Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire have teamed with Democratic demagogues Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri in co-sponsoring a bill that would make matters even worse.

[…]These Republicans are keeping bad company. Gillibrand, for example, published two statements branding a Columbia University student a “rapist” even though he had been cleared by the university and the police had found no basis for charging him. McCaskill, ignoring two generations of progress in the way police and prosecutors approach rape allegations, oddly asserted that “the criminal-justice system has been very bad, in fact much worse than the military and much worse than college campuses, in terms of addressing victims and supporting victims and pursuing prosecutions.”

Does this remind you of anything? It reminds me of the time that Marco Rubio sided with Democrats to give (at least) 20 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. It also reminds me of the time that Marco Rubio sided with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to intervene militarily in Libya. Libya is now a failed state, there is a civil war, Christians are being crucified and Islamic State has started another caliphate there.

So, think about that false rape accusation at UVA, where the accused was slimed and judged guilty, until we found out that the whole thing was a hoax. Apparently, Rubio is all in favor of enabling this sort of situation – enough that he would co-sponsor a bill to remove due process rights from accused college men.

Here’s more from the libertarians at Reason.com:

[…]Rubio is a co-sponsor of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act, which would codify into federal law several of Title IX’s most oppressive dictates. As The Washington Post’s George Will put it:

By co-sponsoring S.  590, Rubio is helping the administration sacrifice a core constitutional value, due process, in order to advance progressives’ cultural aggression. The next Republican president should be someone committed to promptly stopping this disgrace, not someone who would sign S.  590’s affirmation of it.

The Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow attempted to get to the bottom of Rubio’s support for CASA and discovered that the simplest answer was the right one: he just doesn’t care very much about due process on campus. Schow writes:

Rubio is the only GOP candidate that has seemingly taken a stance on this issue – and it is a bad one. He has co-sponsored a bill that codifies into law the overreach of the Education Department and ensures that accused students will not have a fair hearing.

In the past, I blogged about Marco Rubio’s support for amnesty, his support for Hillary Clinton’s disastrous Libya intervention, and his deliberate skipping of votes to defund Planned Parenthood to do campaign events instead. Marco Rubio also pushed for cap-and-trade legislation as Speaker of the House in Florida. This would burden the energy sector with taxes and regulations, and raise the electricity bills of American consumers (who are already hard-pressed). Rubio has a billionaire donor who is strongly in support of gay rights, gay marriage and amnesty – does anyone believe that he does not expect to get his money’s worth if Rubio is elected President?

I hope everyone understands that he has many, many problems. I like Marco Rubio. If he is the nominee, I will back him completely, as he is much better than our nominee in 2012. But right now, my vote goes to the most conservative candidate who can win. And that’s Ted Cruz.