The Redemption of Ted Cruz?
He takes his foot out of his mouth during Tuesday’s Senate hearings on Jan. 6.
by Scott McKay
January 11, 2022, 11:18 PM
I want to be fair to Ted Cruz after last week.
Cruz, while questioning the chief of the Capitol Police in a Senate hearing dealing with the Jan. 6, 2021, fracas, created a controversy on the right when he used the words “violent terrorist attack” to describe what, in other circumstances, CNN and MSNBC might have called a “mostly peaceful protest.”
I let him have it over that:
As you can see, what’s at play here is an attempt to have a respectful but productive dialogue about security at the U.S. Capitol, something nobody should get bent out of shape about, and Cruz is attempting to set the stage for that with Manger by placing himself in the camp opposed to the knuckleheads battling it out with cops under the Capitol rotunda.
But Ted Cruz has to be a whole lot smarter than this.
Because what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 was not a “violent terrorist attack.” It was a protest which got out of hand, for whatever reason (whether pushed that way by agents provocateurs under the employ of the feds or others, for example), and turned into a small riot.
For Ted Cruz to call it such feeds into the narrative Melissa correctly identified on Monday, to no viable purpose. It’s a stupid mistake on Cruz’s part, and he has rightly been pilloried for it.
“The minute you call it a ‘violent terrorist attack on the capitol,’ you lose most of your standing when complaining about the DOJ, Dems and Media because they have diff views than you how to handle a ‘violent terrorist attack on the capitol,’” said Twitter commentator Yossi Gestetner. “Cruz accepts the narrative that lawmakers were about to be lynched despite the fact that many hundreds calmly walked in the Capitol taking selfies and not moving rope lines. It was mostly calm where PD was not at hand. Bloodthirsty terrorists leaving things mostly neat? Haha.
“It’s very possible that Ted Cruz used this language to help bury Trump for 2024 since @tedcruz sees himself as next in line for the nomination.”
Is the accusation that all of this is about trying to kneecap Trump in advance of 2024 legitimate?
If so, it’s misplaced and counterproductive. And having been through this once already, Cruz should know better.
You are not going to displace Donald Trump as the leader of the new populist conservative Right. If Trump is to be replaced that will only happen organically. Attempts to actively replace him — especially using Jan. 6 as a tool to do so — will only get you branded, rightly or not, as an establishment RINO. Cruz is probably still shellshocked six years on at the fact despite having built a nearly pristine record as a conservative iconoclast within the GOP he’s still being tarred as a tool of Goldman Sachs and a functionary of the establishment by some in the MAGA crowd.
Cruz absolutely cannot fix that perception by calling the Jan. 6 protesters “terrorists.” It’s bad form when so many of those protesters are languishing in Washington’s version of the Chateau d’If prison from The Count of Monte Cristo — and not on charges of assaulting cops but for trespassing — a year on with neither bail nor trial on their horizons.
But my treatment of the senator was kid-gloves compared to what happened to Cruz that night on Tucker Carlson’s show:
more/video
https://spectator.org/ted-cruz-january-6/
