Yes, because Obama got elected for being a policy wonk (Hope and Change!), right?
From 2004 onward, the Democrats ran on a platform of vilifying Bush, the war in Iraq and the market crash in 2008 - nothing else. For that, they were rewarded with Congress, a filibuster-proof Senate AND the presidency. Wouldn't you know it, just like the teen being handed the keys to Daddy's Mustang, they totally blew it proving they were unable to govern and lost everything in 2010 and 2014.
Democrats are ruthless and Ted Cruz is one of the very few who knows how to play their game (smartest man in the room etc.). So does Trump. The others will get steamrolled, like Rubio did with the Gang of Eight.
Just listen to what Democrats are saying about each GOP candidate and it's easy to pick the winners from the losers (the ones who will push aggressive reform versus those who will rubber stamp their radical agenda)
The lunatic Cruz, who can't deal with tough, honest questions, by objective moderators, wants cheerleaders to moderate next debate. And the R's are so in the tank, they will likely go along with it.
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/29/how...mocrats_cheerleaders_for_ruining_gop_debates/
[h=1]“How about a debate moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh?”: Ted Cruz blasts “Democrats’ cheerleaders” for ruining GOP debates[/h] [h=2]Apparently, last night's GOP debate would have run a lot smoother if Cruz's faves had moderated[/h] Erin Keane Follow
(Credit: Fox News)
Republican presidential candidate stopped in on “Hannity” last night to give his post-debate thoughts on, as he put it in last night’s CNBC debate, “why the American people don’t trust the media.”
The Texas senator ripped into CNBC’s moderators and moderators of the previous debates, calling them all “the Democrats’ cheerleaders,” when he claimed that “every question is an insult, every question is an attack” and groused that “they don’t do that to the Democrats.”
No doubt host Sean Hannity was thrilled to hear his name on the list of potential future debate moderators when Cruz suggested that only conservatives be allowed to run future GOP primary debates. “Nobody in their right minds thinks any of the moderators will actually vote in a Republican primary. In my view, Republican primary debates ought to be moderated by people who would vote in a Republican primary,” Cruz said.
“How about a debate moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh? Now that would be a debate.” Hannity replied with enthusiasm: “I’m in!”
Cruz kept hammering, saying that the moderators are trying to make the GOP candidates look bad on purpose because they want Americans to either “stay home or vote for Hillary.”
Watch the whole conversation:
http://www.salon.com/2015/10/29/how...mocrats_cheerleaders_for_ruining_gop_debates/
[h=1]“How about a debate moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh?”: Ted Cruz blasts “Democrats’ cheerleaders” for ruining GOP debates[/h] [h=2]Apparently, last night's GOP debate would have run a lot smoother if Cruz's faves had moderated[/h] Erin Keane Follow
(Credit: Fox News)Republican presidential candidate stopped in on “Hannity” last night to give his post-debate thoughts on, as he put it in last night’s CNBC debate, “why the American people don’t trust the media.”
The Texas senator ripped into CNBC’s moderators and moderators of the previous debates, calling them all “the Democrats’ cheerleaders,” when he claimed that “every question is an insult, every question is an attack” and groused that “they don’t do that to the Democrats.”
No doubt host Sean Hannity was thrilled to hear his name on the list of potential future debate moderators when Cruz suggested that only conservatives be allowed to run future GOP primary debates. “Nobody in their right minds thinks any of the moderators will actually vote in a Republican primary. In my view, Republican primary debates ought to be moderated by people who would vote in a Republican primary,” Cruz said.
“How about a debate moderated by Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh? Now that would be a debate.” Hannity replied with enthusiasm: “I’m in!”
Cruz kept hammering, saying that the moderators are trying to make the GOP candidates look bad on purpose because they want Americans to either “stay home or vote for Hillary.”
Watch the whole conversation:
Those idiots would make it a campaign stop, instead of a debate. My rule, were I in charge, would be that only Registered R's can moderate a D debate, and vice versa. Ensure tough, hard questions, rather than campaign speeches. Every question should be a gotcha question, to see how each candidate deals with adversity and their own personal weakness, and negative things that are attached to them.
hno:##):think2:face)(*^%
Policy questions are fine (how are you going to pay for those tax cuts?) but the personal gotcha questions purposely trying to make Republicans look bad (are you a mean and heartless person?) while fawning over their Democrat counterparts (which of you is the best looking?) have to stop.
Mark Levin is a constitutional lawyer and would be more intimidating and tougher on candidates in BOTH parties on POLICY than these unqualified ignorant clowns.
CNBC totally blew it for the gaystream media, since the RNC has now said big changes are coming to the entire debate format.
Oh well...
Mark Levin is a constitutional lawyer and would be more intimidating and tougher on candidates in BOTH parties on POLICY than these unqualified ignorant clowns.
CNBC totally blew it for the gaystream media, since the RNC has now said big changes are coming to the entire debate format.
Oh well...
Gotcha questions, soft ball questions, who gives a shit, so long as the questions get these guys to discuss and debate policy rather than give campaign speeches. There are no winners here. CNBC is a loser with their clown questions. Honestly, does asking Trump if he's a comic book villain facilitate any intelligent discourse? Also, the candidates are losers with their bitching and moaning over "gotcha questions". Nut up and answers the questions. Fair or unfair.
That would ensure a D mandate the likes of which hasn't been seen LBJ- Goldwater.
LBJ-Goldwater was not an ideological election the way the left portrays it. Just like Bush-Kerry wasn't an ideological election the way the right portrays it (are you kidding me? Bush spent a drunken sailor!).
What these two elections have in common (and FDR would be another example) is Americans siding with the incumbent party and president during a time of war.
If the American people rejected Goldwater's ideas, how do you explain them electing his ideological son Ronald Reagan to two landslide elections not even two decades later?
I'll tell you why:
Elections have almost nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with circumstances (war, economy, likability, scandals etc.) because the fact is, to the chagrin of ideologues, Americans aren't ideological.
I have said this before, I'll say it again, right now everything in Washington is a script. The power brokers of Big Government write the script and the gaystream media minions deliver it creating a (false) narrative. The sheep are told which candidates are good and which ones are bad, without knowing the exactly reasons why. Like Hillary's Benghazi hearing, it's all optics over substance:
"Hillary killed it at the Benghazi hearings"
"Ted Cruz is the devil"
As someone who prides themselves on always carrying the false gaystream media narratives, you probably believe both...without being able to make a convincing case, other than "it's just how it is"
With all that said, the key for the good guys (conservatives) to breakthrough and win is to find articulate candidates who can smash through the Washington scripts.
Speaking of scripts, as a teenager Cruz memorized the Constitution word for word. Like Hussein, Cruz is a conviction politician, which is why he is so feared on the left. Battle-hardened from his days arguing in front of the Supreme of Court, Cruz takes the current assaults on our liberties very personally.
I'm glad you continue to underestimate this fierce brilliant Patriot. If he ends up on the GOP ticket, you can thank another fine Patriot for putting him on the map:
The Guesser prides himself as a 'fact' guy. Here you go...seeing is believing:
Watch this comparison of CNBC belittling, INSULTING questions to CNN’s open-ended SOFTBALL questions to Dems
[h=1]popcorn-eatinggifCuban Peers Dispute Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro[/h] By JASON HOROWITZNOV. 9, 2015
Photo
The school records of Rafael Cruz from 1954, when he was about 15 years old. Stories from his upbringing in Cuba, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his son, who is running for president, have hooked Republican audiences. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times
MATANZAS, Cuba — Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.
Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination. In their telling, the father’s experience in Cuba — when the country was swept up by the charismatic young Fidel Castro, only to see him become a repressive Communist dictator — becomes a parable for the son’s nightmarish vision of government overreach under President Obama.
But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.popcorn-eatinggif
Senator Ted Cruz and his father, Rafael, second from right, attended the Pastors and Pews event in Des Moines in March. Now a pastor and Tea Party celebrity, Rafael Cruz is his son’s best campaign surrogate. Credit Ryan Donnell for The New York Times The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.
In fact, Mr. País was killed seven months later and in a different place and manner.
In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.
Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers. “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”
There is no question that Rafael Cruz, who is now a pastor and his son’s most effective and popular campaign surrogate, was beaten in 1957 at the hands of agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator.
An old neighbor remembers soldiers bloodying the 18-year-old Mr. Cruz’s face and driving off with him that summer. Mr. Cruz gives a harrowing account of soldiers beating him over three or four days, stomping on the back of his head and breaking his teeth. A mug shot in his son’s book shows him with a bruised nose, and a 1959 article in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin, which he attended after fleeing to the United States, reported he had lost “half of his upper denture” in the beatings.
The reason Mr. Cruz was arrested, however, is less clear, and he has offered different explanations. In an interview alongside his son in March, Mr. Cruz said he had sought to recruit to the revolutionary cause someone who turned out to be an informant working for Batista’s regime. The 1959 account, though, did not mention any informant; Rafael Cruz said then that the authorities were alerted to his involvement in the resistance by another man, who gave up only Mr. Cruz’s name after Batista’s forces beat it out of him and left him bleeding in the same cell as Mr. Cruz.
Mario Martínez, who Mr. Cruz confirmed was part of his small revolutionary cell, said he did not recall Mr. Cruz’s being apprehended for trying to recruit someone and said he believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used.
Mr. Martínez declined to be directly interviewed and relayed answers to questions posed by The New York Times about Mr. Cruz through Ms. Arestuche. According to Mr. Martínez’s account, he and Mr. Cruz had belonged to the youth brigade of Mr. Castro’s 26th of July Movement in their hometown, Matanzas, but had done little besides join in protest marches. They never turned to violence, he said.
The fog of almost 60 years can cloud even the clearest of memories, and it is possible that witnesses who can back up Mr. Cruz’s account might exist and come forward. But none of the Cuban historians, former comrades of Mr. Cruz in his hometown or veterans of the Santiago battle reached by The Times could corroborate his story.
Photo
None of the Cuban historians, hometown comrades from Matanzas and Santiago battle veterans interviewed could corroborate Mr. Cruz's story. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times Approached in Marietta, Ohio, on Oct. 13, between wooing campaign donors and headlining a Republican dinner, Mr. Cruz was unable to provide the name of any participant from the Santiago assault. “I mean, we were scattered,” he said, adding, “I was with one other guy at a little coffee place or something like that, and I don’t remember his name.”
Unlike some other American presidential candidates, Ted Cruz remains largely unknown in Cuba, and most of the people interviewed for this article had never heard of him. But the Cruz campaign rejected those who disputed Rafael Cruz’s version of events as politically motivated.
“To repeat statements from Communist officials in Castro’s Cuba regarding events from nearly 60 years ago as truth is irresponsible reporting and simply has no basis in truth,” Catherine Frazier, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement. “For the Batista soldiers who tortured and imprisoned Pastor Rafael Cruz, there was no such confusion.”
A Misplaced Memory
Ted Cruz’s origin story begins in Matanzas, a quiet seaside town where his father grew up along a dirt road shaded with plantain trees, and fished with a line that carved notches into his fingers.
The son of a salesman and a teacher, Rafael Bienvenido Cruz y Díaz wore parted hair and round tortoiseshell glasses at the Arturo Echemendia primary school, an exclusive school in Matanzas with 15-foot wooden doors. At 12, he placed into the town’s private high school. He earned good grades, except in Cuban history, with which he struggled.
Instead, he says, he lived it.
His schoolmates had nicknamed him El Flaco — the skinny one. But his comrades gave him a code name: Cuatro Ojos. Four Eyes. Within two or three years of the 1952 coup that brought Batista, a former president, back to power, Mr. Cruz says, he was participating in street protests and marches against the dictatorship — “which were normally met with billy clubs.”
Yet the real action in Cuba was 500 miles east, in Santiago, where Mr. País, a charismatic, mustachioed 21-year-old, was leading a clandestine sabotage campaign and building toward a major armed uprising in the city, planned to coincide with the expected return of Mr. Castro from Mexico on Nov. 30, 1956.
The assault, known simply by its date, was a failure: Mr. Castro’s boat full of rebels arrived two days late, and the operation quickly fizzled. But it became a landmark moment in Cuban history. The Museum of the Revolution in Havana preserves the trousers and spectacles of participating rebels behind glass.
Photo
Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Rafael Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times Mr. Cruz was one of them, he said in the interview. He had enrolled in September 1956 at the university in Santiago. There, he said, “I became involved with the Castro group.”
“I knew Frank País personally and I saw him 12 hours before he was killed,” Mr. Cruz has said in speeches.
In the interview, he said he was part of a group of young rebels held in reserve, waiting to receive weapons. When the Castro boat did not show, they were told to “scram,” he said.
But veterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.
Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.
Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.
“I don’t remember meeting Rafael Cruz,” said Agustín País, Frank’s brother, who now lives in Miami.
In the March interview, Mr. Cruz — coaxed by his son the candidate — described the Nov. 30 uprising.
“And País was killed there,” Ted Cruz interjected.
“Yes,” said his father.
Photo
Liborio Vera Andreu, 79, who was a schoolmate and leader in the youth brigades in Matanzas, said Mr. Cruz’s involvement had been limited to participating “in strikes and in protests.” Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times Told that Mr. País had been executed the next year, in a different place, and that this had been amply documented, Rafael Cruz brushed off the mistake: “I don’t remember where País was killed,” he said.
In his book “A Time for Truth,” published in June, Ted Cruz writes that the rebels who attacked the Santiago Police Headquarters met devastating resistance, and “All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank País.”
But of the scores of rebels who participated in the attack, only a few were killed, according to eyewitness accounts and historical documents.
Rafael Cruz did not defend his exaggeration of the number of rebels killed in the Nov. 30 uprising. “I mean, I left within a couple of days of that,” he said. “We left town.”
Conflicting Accounts
All of the unrest in Santiago de Cuba led the Batista government to close the university there, and Mr. Cruz returned to Matanzas, on the north coast, where he says he began leading his old cell and running weapons. In Ted Cruz’s book, he graduated to saboteur, disrupting transportation and communications infrastructure throughout the province.
“Yes, I know him,” said Liborio Vera Andreu, 79, a schoolmate and leader in the youth brigades in Matanzas. But he said Mr. Cruz’s involvement had been limited to participating “in strikes and in protests.”
Asked on different occasions, Mr. Cruz was unable to name any specific acts of sabotage he carried out. He spoke of throwing Molotov cocktails, but could not name any targets.
What is certain is that in the summer of 1957, Mr. Cruz did something to catch the attention of Batista’s enforcers, who patrolled on horseback.
Carmen García, a neighbor, recalled learning that a Jeep full of Batista soldiers had picked up Mr. Cruz. “No one knew he was supposedly conspiring against anything,” she said.
Although Mr. Cruz has said he made the near-fatal error of trying to recruit an informant to the resistance, Jesus Trujillo Tundidor, a childhood friend who also supported Castro, echoed Mr. Martínez in saying that he recalled Mr. Cruz’s being arrested for possession of a pistol.
Mr. Cruz did little to resolve the conflicting accounts. “There was a gun involved,” he said, “and I recall that the informant who turned me in knew that I had it.”
Approached in Ohio, Mr. Cruz was asked to clarify the reason for his 1957 arrest. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said. “I don’t quite remember.” He offered to be interviewed again at an event that night, but instead had a reporter ejected from it.
Whatever the reason for his detainment, Mr. Cruz said he was taken to San Severino castle, where a dank torture cell still inspires dread among locals. In a joint interview in March, Ted Cruz said his father first told him of his brutalization in Cuba after they watched the torture scenes in the movie “Rambo” together.
Now a pastor and Tea Party celebrity, Rafael Cruz is his son’s best campaign surrogate, delighting conservatives and infuriating liberals by divining Satan’s handiwork in the legalization of same-sex marriage, questioning Mr. Obama’s citizenship and recalling that Mr. Castro, too, started out as a leader “talking about hope and change.”
Rafael Cruz said in the joint interview that he got out of the jail after his father successfully pleaded for his release. Records in Matanzas show his father scrambled to help his son apply to the University of Texas, writing to his high school administrators for a copy of his transcript and enclosing return postage.
Mr. Cruz quickly obtained a passport, which was “a work of art,” because his battered face required so much retouching that “I looked like a movie star,” he said in March. Ted Cruz, listening raptly, said he wanted to see the passport himself, and offered to provide a copy. But his campaign later refused.
Rafael Cruz’s Cuban saga ends with him hidden in the back seat of his father’s car in late 1957 as they drove along the coast to Havana, where he boarded a ferry and sailed to Miami, before continuing on to Austin. Since then, his native island has existed for his family as a remote but enduring political reference point.
“I have no desire to go to Cuba,” Mr. Cruz said in the March interview.
“Well, I’ll jump in and say I have a desire to, someday,” said Senator Cruz. “I’d love to go with my father,” he said, once its oppressive rule is a thing of the past.
If they went now, they would see Rafael Cruz’s beachfront home, since redistributed to another family. They would see his father’s old electronics store, where a “Revolution” sign hangs over racks of cheap clothes. And they would see his elementary school, where third graders file into a classroom named in honor of Frank País.
Hannah Berkeley Cohen contributed reporting from Havana. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Photo
The school records of Rafael Cruz from 1954, when he was about 15 years old. Stories from his upbringing in Cuba, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his son, who is running for president, have hooked Republican audiences. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times
MATANZAS, Cuba — Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.
Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the party’s presidential nomination. In their telling, the father’s experience in Cuba — when the country was swept up by the charismatic young Fidel Castro, only to see him become a repressive Communist dictator — becomes a parable for the son’s nightmarish vision of government overreach under President Obama.
But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.popcorn-eatinggif
Senator Ted Cruz and his father, Rafael, second from right, attended the Pastors and Pews event in Des Moines in March. Now a pastor and Tea Party celebrity, Rafael Cruz is his son’s best campaign surrogate. Credit Ryan Donnell for The New York Times The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.
In fact, Mr. País was killed seven months later and in a different place and manner.
In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.
Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers. “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”
There is no question that Rafael Cruz, who is now a pastor and his son’s most effective and popular campaign surrogate, was beaten in 1957 at the hands of agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator.
An old neighbor remembers soldiers bloodying the 18-year-old Mr. Cruz’s face and driving off with him that summer. Mr. Cruz gives a harrowing account of soldiers beating him over three or four days, stomping on the back of his head and breaking his teeth. A mug shot in his son’s book shows him with a bruised nose, and a 1959 article in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper at the University of Texas at Austin, which he attended after fleeing to the United States, reported he had lost “half of his upper denture” in the beatings.
The reason Mr. Cruz was arrested, however, is less clear, and he has offered different explanations. In an interview alongside his son in March, Mr. Cruz said he had sought to recruit to the revolutionary cause someone who turned out to be an informant working for Batista’s regime. The 1959 account, though, did not mention any informant; Rafael Cruz said then that the authorities were alerted to his involvement in the resistance by another man, who gave up only Mr. Cruz’s name after Batista’s forces beat it out of him and left him bleeding in the same cell as Mr. Cruz.
Mario Martínez, who Mr. Cruz confirmed was part of his small revolutionary cell, said he did not recall Mr. Cruz’s being apprehended for trying to recruit someone and said he believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used.
Mr. Martínez declined to be directly interviewed and relayed answers to questions posed by The New York Times about Mr. Cruz through Ms. Arestuche. According to Mr. Martínez’s account, he and Mr. Cruz had belonged to the youth brigade of Mr. Castro’s 26th of July Movement in their hometown, Matanzas, but had done little besides join in protest marches. They never turned to violence, he said.
The fog of almost 60 years can cloud even the clearest of memories, and it is possible that witnesses who can back up Mr. Cruz’s account might exist and come forward. But none of the Cuban historians, former comrades of Mr. Cruz in his hometown or veterans of the Santiago battle reached by The Times could corroborate his story.
Photo
None of the Cuban historians, hometown comrades from Matanzas and Santiago battle veterans interviewed could corroborate Mr. Cruz's story. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times Approached in Marietta, Ohio, on Oct. 13, between wooing campaign donors and headlining a Republican dinner, Mr. Cruz was unable to provide the name of any participant from the Santiago assault. “I mean, we were scattered,” he said, adding, “I was with one other guy at a little coffee place or something like that, and I don’t remember his name.”
Unlike some other American presidential candidates, Ted Cruz remains largely unknown in Cuba, and most of the people interviewed for this article had never heard of him. But the Cruz campaign rejected those who disputed Rafael Cruz’s version of events as politically motivated.
“To repeat statements from Communist officials in Castro’s Cuba regarding events from nearly 60 years ago as truth is irresponsible reporting and simply has no basis in truth,” Catherine Frazier, a campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement. “For the Batista soldiers who tortured and imprisoned Pastor Rafael Cruz, there was no such confusion.”
A Misplaced Memory
Ted Cruz’s origin story begins in Matanzas, a quiet seaside town where his father grew up along a dirt road shaded with plantain trees, and fished with a line that carved notches into his fingers.
The son of a salesman and a teacher, Rafael Bienvenido Cruz y Díaz wore parted hair and round tortoiseshell glasses at the Arturo Echemendia primary school, an exclusive school in Matanzas with 15-foot wooden doors. At 12, he placed into the town’s private high school. He earned good grades, except in Cuban history, with which he struggled.
Instead, he says, he lived it.
His schoolmates had nicknamed him El Flaco — the skinny one. But his comrades gave him a code name: Cuatro Ojos. Four Eyes. Within two or three years of the 1952 coup that brought Batista, a former president, back to power, Mr. Cruz says, he was participating in street protests and marches against the dictatorship — “which were normally met with billy clubs.”
Yet the real action in Cuba was 500 miles east, in Santiago, where Mr. País, a charismatic, mustachioed 21-year-old, was leading a clandestine sabotage campaign and building toward a major armed uprising in the city, planned to coincide with the expected return of Mr. Castro from Mexico on Nov. 30, 1956.
The assault, known simply by its date, was a failure: Mr. Castro’s boat full of rebels arrived two days late, and the operation quickly fizzled. But it became a landmark moment in Cuban history. The Museum of the Revolution in Havana preserves the trousers and spectacles of participating rebels behind glass.
Photo
Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Rafael Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times Mr. Cruz was one of them, he said in the interview. He had enrolled in September 1956 at the university in Santiago. There, he said, “I became involved with the Castro group.”
“I knew Frank País personally and I saw him 12 hours before he was killed,” Mr. Cruz has said in speeches.
In the interview, he said he was part of a group of young rebels held in reserve, waiting to receive weapons. When the Castro boat did not show, they were told to “scram,” he said.
But veterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.
Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.
Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.
“I don’t remember meeting Rafael Cruz,” said Agustín País, Frank’s brother, who now lives in Miami.
In the March interview, Mr. Cruz — coaxed by his son the candidate — described the Nov. 30 uprising.
“And País was killed there,” Ted Cruz interjected.
“Yes,” said his father.
Photo
Liborio Vera Andreu, 79, who was a schoolmate and leader in the youth brigades in Matanzas, said Mr. Cruz’s involvement had been limited to participating “in strikes and in protests.” Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times Told that Mr. País had been executed the next year, in a different place, and that this had been amply documented, Rafael Cruz brushed off the mistake: “I don’t remember where País was killed,” he said.
In his book “A Time for Truth,” published in June, Ted Cruz writes that the rebels who attacked the Santiago Police Headquarters met devastating resistance, and “All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank País.”
But of the scores of rebels who participated in the attack, only a few were killed, according to eyewitness accounts and historical documents.
Rafael Cruz did not defend his exaggeration of the number of rebels killed in the Nov. 30 uprising. “I mean, I left within a couple of days of that,” he said. “We left town.”
Conflicting Accounts
All of the unrest in Santiago de Cuba led the Batista government to close the university there, and Mr. Cruz returned to Matanzas, on the north coast, where he says he began leading his old cell and running weapons. In Ted Cruz’s book, he graduated to saboteur, disrupting transportation and communications infrastructure throughout the province.
“Yes, I know him,” said Liborio Vera Andreu, 79, a schoolmate and leader in the youth brigades in Matanzas. But he said Mr. Cruz’s involvement had been limited to participating “in strikes and in protests.”
Asked on different occasions, Mr. Cruz was unable to name any specific acts of sabotage he carried out. He spoke of throwing Molotov cocktails, but could not name any targets.
What is certain is that in the summer of 1957, Mr. Cruz did something to catch the attention of Batista’s enforcers, who patrolled on horseback.
Carmen García, a neighbor, recalled learning that a Jeep full of Batista soldiers had picked up Mr. Cruz. “No one knew he was supposedly conspiring against anything,” she said.
Although Mr. Cruz has said he made the near-fatal error of trying to recruit an informant to the resistance, Jesus Trujillo Tundidor, a childhood friend who also supported Castro, echoed Mr. Martínez in saying that he recalled Mr. Cruz’s being arrested for possession of a pistol.
Mr. Cruz did little to resolve the conflicting accounts. “There was a gun involved,” he said, “and I recall that the informant who turned me in knew that I had it.”
Approached in Ohio, Mr. Cruz was asked to clarify the reason for his 1957 arrest. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said. “I don’t quite remember.” He offered to be interviewed again at an event that night, but instead had a reporter ejected from it.
Whatever the reason for his detainment, Mr. Cruz said he was taken to San Severino castle, where a dank torture cell still inspires dread among locals. In a joint interview in March, Ted Cruz said his father first told him of his brutalization in Cuba after they watched the torture scenes in the movie “Rambo” together.
Now a pastor and Tea Party celebrity, Rafael Cruz is his son’s best campaign surrogate, delighting conservatives and infuriating liberals by divining Satan’s handiwork in the legalization of same-sex marriage, questioning Mr. Obama’s citizenship and recalling that Mr. Castro, too, started out as a leader “talking about hope and change.”
Rafael Cruz said in the joint interview that he got out of the jail after his father successfully pleaded for his release. Records in Matanzas show his father scrambled to help his son apply to the University of Texas, writing to his high school administrators for a copy of his transcript and enclosing return postage.
Mr. Cruz quickly obtained a passport, which was “a work of art,” because his battered face required so much retouching that “I looked like a movie star,” he said in March. Ted Cruz, listening raptly, said he wanted to see the passport himself, and offered to provide a copy. But his campaign later refused.
Rafael Cruz’s Cuban saga ends with him hidden in the back seat of his father’s car in late 1957 as they drove along the coast to Havana, where he boarded a ferry and sailed to Miami, before continuing on to Austin. Since then, his native island has existed for his family as a remote but enduring political reference point.
“I have no desire to go to Cuba,” Mr. Cruz said in the March interview.
“Well, I’ll jump in and say I have a desire to, someday,” said Senator Cruz. “I’d love to go with my father,” he said, once its oppressive rule is a thing of the past.
If they went now, they would see Rafael Cruz’s beachfront home, since redistributed to another family. They would see his father’s old electronics store, where a “Revolution” sign hangs over racks of cheap clothes. And they would see his elementary school, where third graders file into a classroom named in honor of Frank País.
Hannah Berkeley Cohen contributed reporting from Havana. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
“Religious liberty” advocate Ted Cruz says atheists aren’t fit to be president
11/9/15 8:00am by Jon Green 26
Not only did Ted Cruz fail to repudiate Kevin “Kill the Gays in Public” Swanson and back out from the Evangelical leader’s hatefest this weekend, the self-described “religious liberty” advocate used it as an opportunity to reject the premise of religious liberty entirely.
During a question and answer session with Swanson, Cruz answered literally the first question he was asked by declaring that atheist cannot be president (answer comes at the end of the video):
Said Cruz, when asked if religion was an important quality for a Commander-in-Chief, “Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this nation.”
Of course, we’ve already had secular presidents; just not ones who were able to declare their secularism openly. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison considered themselves deists, which was about as close as you could get in the late 1700s/early 1800s to saying you didn’t believe in God without getting tarred and feathered. Jefferson, a noted skeptic whose Jefferson Bible cut out all of the superfluous dogma from the King James version to tell Jesus’s story as a secular source of wisdom, actually faced accusations of being an atheist during his successful campaigns for political office, including the presidency. Madison, while less overtly skeptical, was nevertheless adamant that religion should have no place in the government, and opposed the idea of having chaplains in the military.
I wouldn’t expect Cruz to bring this up, especially not at a conference full of people who earnestly believe that the faithful are objectively better people than non-believers. But let’s be clear: To say that belief in God is a prerequisite for holding public office is as bad or worse than Ben Carson’s insistence that Muslims should not be elected president. At least in Carson’s case, he qualified his assertion by saying that Muslims who reject illiberal, anti-democratic interpretations of the faith would be acceptable. Cruz is making a similar claim with no qualification whatsoever. If you don’t believe there’s a man upstairs, don’t run for president. You can’t do the job.
As Hemant Mehta noted, Cruz stopped short of saying that atheists are disqualified from running for office entirely. Just that he thinks they are incapable of doing the job of president. But, as he continued (emphasis in the original), “just imagine what his reaction would be if Sen. Bernie Sanders said someone who wastes time praying in office wasn’t fit for the presidency. He’d be crying Christian Persecution the second someone handed him a microphone.”
And let’s not forget that Cruz’s abject rejection of religious pluralism comes just as we brace for another iteration of the War on Christmas. A candidate who has a clear chance at becoming the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States thinks that a lack of religious belief disqualifies one from public office, but insufficiently Noel-ified coffee cups are the real affront to religious freedom.
Christian supremacy in full effect.
11/9/15 8:00am by Jon Green 26
Not only did Ted Cruz fail to repudiate Kevin “Kill the Gays in Public” Swanson and back out from the Evangelical leader’s hatefest this weekend, the self-described “religious liberty” advocate used it as an opportunity to reject the premise of religious liberty entirely.
During a question and answer session with Swanson, Cruz answered literally the first question he was asked by declaring that atheist cannot be president (answer comes at the end of the video):
Said Cruz, when asked if religion was an important quality for a Commander-in-Chief, “Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this nation.”
Of course, we’ve already had secular presidents; just not ones who were able to declare their secularism openly. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison considered themselves deists, which was about as close as you could get in the late 1700s/early 1800s to saying you didn’t believe in God without getting tarred and feathered. Jefferson, a noted skeptic whose Jefferson Bible cut out all of the superfluous dogma from the King James version to tell Jesus’s story as a secular source of wisdom, actually faced accusations of being an atheist during his successful campaigns for political office, including the presidency. Madison, while less overtly skeptical, was nevertheless adamant that religion should have no place in the government, and opposed the idea of having chaplains in the military.
I wouldn’t expect Cruz to bring this up, especially not at a conference full of people who earnestly believe that the faithful are objectively better people than non-believers. But let’s be clear: To say that belief in God is a prerequisite for holding public office is as bad or worse than Ben Carson’s insistence that Muslims should not be elected president. At least in Carson’s case, he qualified his assertion by saying that Muslims who reject illiberal, anti-democratic interpretations of the faith would be acceptable. Cruz is making a similar claim with no qualification whatsoever. If you don’t believe there’s a man upstairs, don’t run for president. You can’t do the job.
As Hemant Mehta noted, Cruz stopped short of saying that atheists are disqualified from running for office entirely. Just that he thinks they are incapable of doing the job of president. But, as he continued (emphasis in the original), “just imagine what his reaction would be if Sen. Bernie Sanders said someone who wastes time praying in office wasn’t fit for the presidency. He’d be crying Christian Persecution the second someone handed him a microphone.”
And let’s not forget that Cruz’s abject rejection of religious pluralism comes just as we brace for another iteration of the War on Christmas. A candidate who has a clear chance at becoming the Republican Party’s nominee for President of the United States thinks that a lack of religious belief disqualifies one from public office, but insufficiently Noel-ified coffee cups are the real affront to religious freedom.
Christian supremacy in full effect.
Ted Cruz is very dangerous. Creepy guy
www.yahoo.com/news/ted-Cruz-lauds-anti-abortion-210755532.html
www.yahoo.com/news/ted-Cruz-lauds-anti-abortion-210755532.html
General Election: Cruz vs. Clinton
Polling Data
Polling Data
| Poll | Date | Sample | MoE | Clinton (D) | Cruz (R) | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RCP Average | 12/2 - 12/21 | -- | -- | 45.8 | 45.0 | Clinton +0.8 |
| CNN/ORC | 12/17 - 12/21 | 927 RV | 3.0 | 46 | 48 | Cruz +2 |
| Quinnipiac | 12/16 - 12/20 | 1140 RV | 2.9 | 44 | 44 | Tie |
| FOX News | 12/16 - 12/17 | 1013 RV | 3.0 | 45 | 45 | Tie |
| PPP (D) | 12/16 - 12/17 | 1267 RV | 2.8 | 45 | 43 | Clinton +2 |
| NBC/WSJ | 12/6 - 12/9 | 849 RV | 3.4 | 48 | 45 | Clinton +3 |
| USA Today/Suffolk | 12/2 - 12/6 | 1000 LV | 3.0 | 47 | 45 | Clinton +2 |
