Breitbart is here — and his name is Ted Cruz!

Daily Inter Lake ^ | Saturday, September 13, 2014 6:00 pm 

You may remember Andrew Breitbart.

You should. Before his sudden and rather mysterious death at the age of 43 on March 1, 2012, he was a fearless voice of untrammeled American conservatism. He would stand up to anyone, no matter how powerful, in defense of traditional values and against political chicanery. He took on ACORN, Anthony Weiner, Nancy Pelosi, of course President Obama, and anyone else who tried to acquire power through hypocrisy or change policy through chicanery.

His death left a huge void in the world of conservatism. So big, in fact, that conservatives adopted a slogan to encourage each other to continue in his footsteps — “Breitbart is here.”

But if he is still here in some small measure — in the form of Breitbart.com particularly — he is also sorely missed. There is hardly anyone quite like him on the scene — witty, affable, armed with facts, and a steadfast defender of the Constitution.

Unlike most Republican politicians, for instance, Breitbart was not afraid of telling the truth, he was not afraid of being called names, and he was not afraid of being alone. He didn’t just show up; he spoke up! Boy, did he speak up! If in fact, you don’t remember Breitbart’s gift for verbal jousting, you should look him up on YouTube or read his book “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!”

Righteous indignation very well describes Breitbart’s approach to what he called “the army of the emboldened and gleefully ill-informed.” It also sadly describes what is missing from the mainstream establishment politicians — Republican, Democratic, what have you — who can barely muster a sneeze in response to the cultural collapse of our once great nation at the hands of an anti-American alliance that can alternately be described as atheistic, communistic, and anarchistic.

Of course, you can’t blame those politicians for lying low. After all, speaking out against the enemies of America actually requires making enemies among those people who aim to destroy America, and thus possibly losing votes you need so that you can remain in office to do nothing to help America. It is the political equivalent of not declaring war against ISIS for beheading Americans because you are afraid you will offend ISIS and make them hate Americans.

But we do hope for elected officials and candidates who are leaders first, and politicians only incidentally. That mythical creature would tell people the truth without fear of ridicule, without concern for popularity polls, without the need to run their “talking points” past a “focus group” before opening their mouth.

Oh, wait a minute — that’s not a mythical creature; it’s Sarah Palin. But you saw what happened to Palin, didn’t you? Belittled, besieged and besmirched. And what did she say that was so horrible? Just that Russia is a close neighbor to Alaska, and “we need to have a good relationship with them.”

Oh yeah, you probably think she said she could see Russia from her house, and that would have been silly and ridiculous, but she never said it. Comedian Tina Fey did on “Saturday Night Live.” What Palin said was that you can see Russia from part of Alaska, explaining, “I’m giving you that perspective of how small our world is and how important it is that we work with our allies to keep good relations with all of these countries, especially Russia. We will not repeat a Cold War. We must have good relationship with our allies, pressuring, also, helping us to remind Russia that it’s in their benefit, also, a mutually beneficial relationship for us all to be getting along.”

This was after she had already told ABC interviewer Charles Gibson that, “we’ve got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable.”

She was talking about Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia, and everything she said was “spot on,” but as I pointed out in a column from that year, Charlie Gibson and ABC News carefully edited the broadcast interview with Palin to make her look foolish. It was only by reading the transcript of the complete interview that you could tell Palin had given a thoughtful analysis of the danger of Putin’s Russia.

Looking backwards, of course, Palin looks like a genius, but you will never hear that from the mainstream press or her political opponents. Nor will they ever acknowledge her campaign speech in Reno a couple months later where she predicted exactly how Putin would take advantage of Barack Obama’s naivete if he were elected president:

“After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Sen. Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.”

Do you think the Foreign Policy editor who called Palin’s prophecy “strange” and “an extremely far-fetched scenario” has ever apologized? Probably not, because, well, why should he? The damage he did was what he intended — and it didn’t have anything to do with the truth, so the truth was (and is) simply not relevant to his attack on Palin.

That kind of callous disregard for the truth wielded by so many political commentators is why so many candidates and politicians steer clear of anything controversial, or anything confrontational, or anything that doesn’t toe the line of mediocrity, er, I mean compromise.

Which brings us in a roundabout way to Ted Cruz.

Cruz is no stranger to ridicule. As a true conservative in a party of the faux variety, he is not only lambasted by the media elite like Jon Stewart but also by the Republican Party’s sad equivalent of a brain trust — Karl Rove, Mitch McConnell and John McCain.

This past week, Sen. Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, showed why he is a worthy heir to Breitbart’s mantle of fearlessness and his sword of truth.

On Tuesday, he sent a scathing letter to the commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service (John Koskinen, also known as the stonewaller-in-chief for his role in covering up the Lois Lerner scandal) expressing “deep concern” over the news that Breitbart News was to be the subject of “a far-reaching, burdensome and open-ended audit.”

Sen. Cruz said the evidence “paints a disturbing picture of a coordinated assault on the First Amendment” by the Obama administration.

“Given the IRS’s disturbing track record of illegally targeting conservative organizations — including the IRS recently paying a $50,000 settlement for having wrongfully leaked a conservative group’s confidential tax information — and the persistent refusal by the current Department of Justice to meaningfully investigate or prosecute those crimes, the decision to audit Breitbart News Network, LLC appears highly questionable.”

Of course, this direct challenge to the administration was met by silence except for a statement from the tax agency that “the IRS has safeguards in place to protect the exam process.” Yeah, like disappearing hard drives and missing e-mails with damning evidence of government overreach.

If that were all Cruz had accomplished in a week, he would be well-positioned to claim to be the heir to Breitbart’s role as the modern-day St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes, for surely taking on the IRS is the ultimate lost cause, isn’t it?

But the very next day, Cruz took on another lost cause — defending the Jews against the eternal specter of anti-Semitism — when he was keynote speaker at a gala hosted by a group called In Defense of Christians, which exists for the purpose of promoting the cause of persecuted Christians in the Middle East.

Cruz made the mistake of pointing out that Christians are not the only persecuted group in the Middle East. “Tonight, we are all united in defense of Christians,” Cruz said. “Tonight, we are all united in defense of Jews. Tonight, we are all united in defense of people of good faith, who are standing together against those who would persecute and murder those who dare disagree with their religious teachings.”

That proved a little controversial (well, a lot controversial actually). Apparently we are not all united in defense of people of good faith, after all.

When Cruz continued, “Christians have no greater ally than Israel,” the boos began. “Those who hate Israel hate America, and those who hate Jews hate Christians,” he said. “If those in this room will not recognize that, then my heart weeps. If you hate the Jewish people you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ.”

The catcalls and jeers just got worse. So bad, in fact, that Cruz left the stage with a Breitbart-like jab of righteous indignation: “If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews, then I will not stand with you. Good night, and God bless.”

As Cruz wrote later on his Facebook page, “sadly, a vocal and angry minority of attendees at the conference tried to shout down my expression of solidarity with Israel. They cannot shout down the truth. And we should not shy away from expressing the truth, even in the face of — especially in the face of — ignorance and bigotry.”

Yep, Breitbart is definitely here.