And dumb Conservatives cheer him on like dummies…
Here’s what happened… President Obama is proposing a uniquely and aggressively horrible deal with Iran that would give it – the most anti-American regime currently in existence – hundreds of billions of dollars, for nothing in return. Nothing. Just says “here you go. you use this responsibly though, okay?”. And just like with the lifting of the blocks between the U.S. and Cuba – Obama’s getting the country he represents nothing in the deal. The argument in favor of this ridiculous Iran deal is that it somehow delays instead of hastens Iran getting a nuclear bomb by 15 years, a concept that is wholly unfounded according to the details of the actual agreement signed by the Government of the United States.
In response to this awfulness, senator Ted Cruz, who is running for the 2016 presidential nomination, noted that this makes the Obama administration a financial facilitator of Islamic terrorism, saying:
“If this deal is consummated, it will make the Obama administration the world’s leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism,” Cruz said during a round table Tuesday. “Billions of dollars under control of this administration will flow into the hands of jihadists who will use that money to murder Americans, to murder Israelis, to murder Europeans.”
It’s true that the money Iran will get will likely be used to murder people and it’s true that Iran wouldn’t have this money if not for the Obama administrations agreement and it’s true that this was not a helpful thing for Cruz to say.
Mitt Romney, noted as such.
I am opposed to the Iran deal, but @SenTedCruz is way over the line on the Obama terrorism charge. Hurts the cause.
— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) July 30, 2015
Which is the most sensible commentary a rational mind can have on the topic. Cruz’s comment isn’t wrong but the way it’s stated is so clunky that it hands Obama supporters a gift to turn a bad Obama policy into an opportunity to make Ted Cruz and Republicans the target of scorn. That is friggin horrible strategy but Cruz is notorious for being non-strategical. Which is cool if you want to drum up angst from your base but super horrible if your intention is to win elections. Romney helped his party by voicing his opposition to the deal while also noting that it most obviously hurts that oppositional cause for people like Cruz to be simplifying the dot-connections the way he did.
Cruz replied to Romneys criticism in typical Cruzian fashion (read: terribly):
Cruz, 2016 presidential candidate, fired back at Romney in a Thursday radio interview with KFYO’s Chad Hasty.
“So Mitt Romney’s tweet today said, ‘Gosh, this rhetoric is not helpful,'” Cruz said. “John Adams famously said, ‘Facts are stubborn things.’ Describing the actual facts is not using rhetoric; it is called speaking the truth.”
The senator recalled what he described as a critical moment during the 2012 presidential race: A back-and-forth over that year’s attack on a diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya.
“Part of the reason that Mitt Romney got clobbered by Barack Obama is because we all remember that third debate where Barack Obama turned to Mitt and said, ‘I said the Benghazi attack was terrorism and no one is more upset by Benghazi than I am.’ And Mitt, I guess listening to his own advice, said, ‘Well gosh, I don’t want to use any rhetoric. So OK, never mind. I’ll just kind of rearrange the pencil on the podium here,'” Cruz said.
He added that the 2016 presidential candidates need to speak up or they will fail like Romney.
I’ll get to why Cruz doesn’t know what he’s talking about here later in this post, but first a factual correction: Cruz’s claim never actually happened. As I’ve shown before, Romney expertly trapped President Obama on the Benghazi issue in the 2nd debate by going 3 rounds on the subject and giving Obama every inch of rope he needed to hang himself on the issue. Romney noted that Obama not only did not treat the terrorist attacks in Benghazi as such, but actually took great lengths to deceive the American people about the nature of the attacks, instead blaming a Youtube video for them. Obama, knowing that he was getting trapped in having to either lie by claiming he did something he did not do or obfuscate the question merely said “check the transcript” of his rose garden speech on the subject, in where he knew he could point to the word “terrorism” being present and then spin that as having taken responsibility for the attacks as being terrorism (successfully avoiding the messy explanation of the ensuing phony claims about a Youtube video instigation). In an unprecedented move, the debate moderator Candy Crowley stepped in and falsely claimed that Obama was correct in his claim about labeling the act terrorism and even though she walked it back later and the truth was verified by fact checkers, the damage had been done on live tv. To blame Romney for not attacking the issue he actually attacked in the most perfect of strategic ways is nonsense.
However – Republicans are just not smart enough to understand this and many agree with Cruz that Romney’s reason-for-loss was that he wasn’t tough enough on the President.
Here is how Rush Limbaugh summarized the positions of both men:
“Both Obama and Romney have called Cruz’s remarks inappropriate.” What has Cruz done? He’s “maintained that [Obama] would become a leading state-sponsor of terror if the agreement it struck with Iran makes it past Congress. He and others have argued that Iran would use a windfall from sanctions relief to finance terror abroad.” He has said on that basis alone this deal ought not get done! And then Romney piped up and said in a tweet (paraphrased): “Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful. Gosh, this rhetoric isn’t helpful!”
Cruz fired back: “You’re telling me what’s not helpful? You got clobbered by Obama for a reason! You got clobbered because you backed off. You got clobbered because you didn’t have the guts to keep going.” So this is… I like this, folks. Whatever Trump’s responsible for it or not.
The truth is that both Cruz and Romney lost competitions to Obama but in very different ways…
In 2012 Mitt Romney ran for president against Barack Obama and lost.
In 2013 Ted Cruz led a strategy from the Senate against Barack Obama’s signature legislation “Obamacare” and lost.
Romney’s strategy was verifiably better at every level. Victory was in sight – the numbers just didn’t add up at the end since his side was fractured from a year of in-fighting and bad press while Obama’s side was boosted and mobilized during that time (and as I’ve pointed out before: the key to winning elections is to fracture the OTHER side and unite yours).
Cruz’s strategy in the senate was verifiably guaranteed to fail at every level as there was literally just no path to victory outside of President Obama just deciding to become a Republican overnight one day.
Cruz’s tactic of denying funding to Obamacare that caused a deadlock with the Democrats who refused to negotiate on the matter, resulting in a government shutdown that ultimately got Cruz absolutely nothing but scorn from the media and public at large.
So both men lost in their matches with President Obama, but one fought valiantly and one fought irresponsibly with literally no strategy to actually win.
Alternate headline: Defeated-by-Democrats-TedCruz lectures Defeated-by-Democrats-MittRomney on why the GOP gets defeated by Democrats.
Doesn’t sound like such bold talk when you put it that way now does it. Yet that’s exactly the case.
The only difference is that Romney actually had a chance of winning.