Since the CNBC debate, the media, their allies in left-wing blogs and Hillary Clinton campaign surrogates masquerading as non-profits like Media Matters have all launched an aggressive attack on the Republican candidates. One might think it was revenge for calling out obvious media bias. One might think that in seeking that revenge they are also proving the GOP right. I wouldn't argue with one if one thought one or both of those things, once or twice.
The latest target on the media hit list is Senator Ted Cruz, who’s absolutely blistering assault on the CNBC moderators became practically legendary only minutes after he delivered it. But rather than attacking Cruz’s own history, the New York Times is going after his father’s history. From when he was under the thumb of the brutal dictator of an oppressed nation. Because classy.
From the Times:
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 Molotov cocktails, running guns and surviving torture.In case you don’t immediately see the problem here, I give you Mr. Nathan Wurtzel on Twitter:
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 an increasingly serious 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 and biographical heft to Mr. Cruz's speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father's Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.
| Basing a story on decades-old eyewitness testimony is garbage. You can't possibly know what's true.https://t.co/tWu5Xije3W — MR. Nathan Wurtzel (@NathanWurtzel) November 9, 2015 |
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."That is a description of a word that was used for a kind of person. That’s not remotely some smoking gun indictment of what Cruz’s pop has said. That’s actually absurd.
They admit that Cruz was indeed arrested and beaten by brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, but then call into question if his resistance was really all that beating-worthy. In their eyes his beating barely rises to the level of story-worthy. So he got beaten for being part of the resistance, so what? He wasn’t all THAT resisty. Maybe the guards just had a bad day or someone stole their cigars, you know?
The rest of the article goes on in similar flaccid fashion, acknowledging that there might be others out there with more direct eyewitness accounts that support Cruz. But hey, what difference does that make? Just write the story anyway. It’s really just the headline that matters. Ted Cruz’s dad is a liar. Case closed.
Dumb story. Dumb paper. Dumb liberals. Dump the media.
