Tag Archives: Military

Commentary

Social conservative hero James Dobson endorses Ted Cruz

Leave a comment
Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz
Republican Senate candidate Ted Cruz

Remember how I was freaking out about Marco Rubio from the day he announced his candidacy for the Florida Senate seat? Well, I think that Ted Cruz is another Marco Rubio. He may even eclipse Marco Rubio.

And James Dobson likes him, too.

Excerpt:

Today, we are excited to announce that national pro-life, family values leader Dr. James Dobson is endorsing our Senate campaign.

In his endorsement announcement, Dr. Dobson said: “I’m pleased to endorse Ted Cruz for U.S. Senate because he’s exactly the kind of candidate we need to turn this country around. Religious freedom is under assault every day. We need leaders with the courage to stand strong for conservative values in this battle. Ted Cruz is such a leader—one who will not only vote his convictions in the Senate, but will also lead the fight to defend life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty.”

Dr. Dobson added: “Ted Cruz stands out among conservative leaders across the country today. He has a consistent record of standing up for faith, family, and freedom, and winning values battles on a national level….I urge all Texans who love life, family, faith, and freedom to not only vote for Ted Cruz, but to work hard for his campaign.”

Here’s an interview with Ted Cruz from non other than Robert Stacy McCain!

About Ted Cruz

George Will thinks that Republican candidate Ted Cruz is the man to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas.

Excerpt:

For a conservative Texan seeking national office, it could hardly get better than this: In a recent 48-hour span, Ted Cruz, a candidate for next year’s Republican Senate nomination for the seat being vacated by Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, was endorsed by the Club for Growth PAC, FreedomWorks PAC, talk-radio host Mark Levin and Erick Erickson of RedState.com.

For conservatives seeking reinforcements for Washington’s too-limited number of limited-government constitutionalists, it can hardly get better than this: Before he earned a Harvard law degree magna cum laude (and helped found the Harvard Latino Law Review) and clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Cruz’s senior thesis at Princeton — his thesis adviser was professor Robert George, one of contemporary conservatism’s intellectual pinups — was on the Constitution’s Ninth and 10th amendments. Then as now, Cruz argued that these amendments, properly construed, would buttress the principle that powers not enumerated are not possessed by the federal government.

Robbie George??? Robbie George??? Holy snouts! That guy is one of the top academic pro-lifers. Every Christian apologist knows about Robbie George. It’s the law! Well, it isn’t. But it should be!

I continue:

At age 14, Cruz’s father fought with rebels (including Fidel Castro) against Cuba’s dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Captured and tortured, at 18 he escaped to America with $100 sewn in his underwear. He graduated from the University of Texas and met his wife — like him, a mathematician — with whom he founded a small business processing seismic data for the oil industry.

By the time Ted Cruz was 13, he was winning speech contests sponsored by a Houston free-enterprise group that gave contestants assigned readings by Frederic Bastiat, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. In his early teens he traveled around Texas and out of state giving speeches. At Princeton, he finished first in the 1992 U.S. National Debate Championship and North American Debate Championship.

As Texas’s solicitor general from 2003 to 2008, Cruz submitted 70 briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has, so far, argued nine cases there. He favors school choice and personal investment accounts for a portion of individuals’ Social Security taxes. He supports the latter idea with a bow to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said such accounts enable the doorman to build wealth the way the people in the penthouse do.

Regarding immigration, Cruz, 40, demands secure borders and opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants but echoes Ronald Reagan’s praise of legal immigrants as “Americans by choice,” people who are “crazy enough” to risk everything in the fundamentally entrepreneurial act of immigrating.

Ted Cruz has Republican life experiences: legal immigrant, fought communism, studied something that required actual work, founded a small business, etc. This is the prototypical Republican!

You can find out more about him on his positions page. I was interested in his stance on social issues, in particular.

Excerpt:

Ted Cruz has fought to protect innocent human life. He played a leading role in several important cases, including defense of the partial-birth abortion ban, parental consent laws, and prohibiting state funds from going to abortion. These cases have all been part of the ongoing effort to ensure that every child in America  receives the protection and respect he or she deserves.

  • Authored an amicus brief for 13 states, successfully defending the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The ban was upheld 5-4 before the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • Authored an amicus brief for 18 states, successfully defending the New Hampshire parental notification law. The law was upheld 9-0 before the U.S. Supreme Court [note: this brief was awarded the Best Brief Award from the National Association of Attorneys General for U.S. Supreme Court briefs written in 2005-06];
  • Successfully defended Texas’s Rider 8, which prohibits state funds for groups that provide abortions, winning unanimously before the Fifth Circuit court of appeals.

Ted Cruz has worked hard in defense of traditional marriage, including his intervention in a case protecting Texas marriage laws. In addition, he has fought on the federal level to defend marriage between one man and one woman as the fundamental building block of society.

  • When a Beaumont state court granted a divorce to two homosexual men who had gotten a civil union in Vermont, Cruz, under the leadership of Attorney General Greg Abbott, intervened in defense of the marriage laws of the State of Texas, which successfully led to the court judgment being vacated;
  • Worked with Attorney General Abbott to send a letter to Congress in support of the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

He has lots of nice actions related to lots of conservative policies on that page. What a resume! Energy production, voter fraud prevention, border security, legal firearm ownership – you name it, this guy has been fighting for conservative principles. Like Michele Bachmann, (and unlike RINO Mitt Romney), he has actually tried to do pro-life and pro-marriage things. We don’t just have to take his word for it, he has the actions to prove his words. Just look at the list of issues on his page!

News

CIA Director Leon Panetta confirms that waterboarding led to Osama Bin Laden

3 Comments

CIA Director Leon Panetta confirms that waterboarding / enhanced interrogation techniques led to Osama Bin Laden, in this MSNBC interview by Brian Williams.

Excerpt:

Brian Williams: I’d like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after Bin Laden?

Leon Panetta: You know, Brian, in the intelligence business you work from a lot of sources of information, and that was true here. We had a multiple series of sources that provided information with regards to this situation. Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees, but we also had information from other sources as well. So it’s a little difficult to say it was due just to one source of information that we got.

Williams: Turned around the other way, are you denying that waterboarding was in part among the tactics used to extract the intelligence that led to this successful mission?

Panetta: No, I think some of the detainees clearly were — you know, they used these enhanced interrogation techniques against some of these detainees. But I’m also saying that the debate about whether we would have gotten the same information through other approaches I think is always going to be an open question.

Williams: So, final point, one final time: enhanced interrogation techniques, which has always been kind of a handy euphemism in these post-9/11 years, that includes waterboarding.

Panetta: That’s correct.

This is the waterboarding that Obama opposed. Obama opposed enhanced interrogations. Obama opposed military tribunals. Obama opposed CIA prisons. Obama opposed Guantanamo Bay. Obama opposes counter-terrorism in general.

And don’t forget how waterboarding prevented a similar 9/11-style attack on Los Angeles.

Excerpt:

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

Before he was waterboarded, when KSM was asked about planned attacks on the United States, he ominously told his CIA interrogators, “Soon, you will know.”

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

KSM was the mastermind of the first “hijacked-airliner” attacks on the United States, which struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Northern Virginia on Sept. 11, 2001.

After KSM was captured by the United States, he was not initially cooperative with CIA interrogators.  Nor was another top al Qaeda leader named Zubaydah.  KSM, Zubaydah, and a third terrorist named Nashiri were the only three persons ever subjected to waterboarding by the CIA.

Waterboarding works. It is not torture. We waterboard all our our naval aviators as part of their SERE training.

But do you know what is torture? Partial-birth abortion. We don’t partial-birth abort our naval aviators as part of their SERE training – yet the same people who oppose waterboarding support partial-birth abortion.

Related posts

News

Rick Santorum explains his support for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”

Leave a comment

Republican Rick Santorum explains his support Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell on Fox News Sunday.

Excerpt:

Someone’s race is not a factor in his ability to serve in the military because it’s a passive trait, but homosexuality requires active behavior and that makes it a potential barrier to unit cohesion in the military, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum said Sunday, distinguishing between an earlier argument against integration in the Armed Forces.

Explaining his opposition to the repeal of don’t ask, don’t tell, the defunct military policy that prohibits gays from serving openly in the military, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate said the two situations are “very, very different.”

“I mean, we are talking about people who are, you know, simply different because of the color of their skin, not because of activities that would cause problems for people living in those close quarters,” said Santorum, considered one of the most socially conservative candidates in the race.

[…]”It’s not the same. And I know people try to make it the same, but it is not. It is a behavioral issue, as opposed to a color of the skin issue, and that makes all the difference when it comes to serving in the military,” he added.

Santorum said members of the military live in close proximity to one another, and by necessity must shower together in the barracks or out in the field.

That makes some people uncomfortable, he said, and “it could hurt our ability to retain and recruit and to put the best fighting force in place.”

“You’re talking about the ability for people to be able to have that unit cohesion, to be able to work together in a efficient fighting way,” he said.

[…]”I know the whole gay community is trying to make this the new Civil Rights Act. It’s not. It’s not the same. You are black by the color of your skin. You are not homosexual necessarily by — obviously by the color of your skin or anything — it’s by a variety of things.”

Rick Santorum may be the only conservative running in this primary who understands these social issues enough to tell the truth about them. We’ve looked at the studies and seen that he’s right about sexual orientation being co-related with a variety of factors, some genetic and some environmental. But that’s not the view of people in the mainstream media, nor in the culture at large. Many people don’t take the time to look at the studies, such as the identical twin studies, which show that there is no genetically determined behavior called homosexuality – homosexuality is, at least in part, a choice. For those who haven’t looked at the actual research, that may come as a surprise, though. I think that for contentious issues like gay rights and same-sex marriage, it’s a good idea to hear both sides in a formal debate.