And there you haveCNN’s breathless recounting of Mother Jones’s piece on Ted Cruz’s dad in a nutshell:
Comments from last year by the father of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, including a desire to send President Barack Obama “back to Kenya,” are creating a new controversy Thursday.
A story by the left-leaning news organization Mother Jones highlights a series of newly surfaced videos that also feature Rafael Cruz calling the United States “a Christian nation,” urging men to reclaim their place as the “spiritual” head of the household and lambasting the so-called “death panels” that some conservatives claim are in the President’s health care law.
The elder Cruz, a successful businessman turned evangelical pastor, and an immigrant from Cuba, along with his son, has become a hero among many tea party activists and social conservatives.
One of the most explosive statements comes from an April 2012 video, as his son was running for the Senate, and as the President was running for re-election.
“We need to send Barack Obama back to Chicago,”Cruz urges. “Back to Kenya.”
The sheer volume of completely stupid shit Ted Cruz has uttered could just about be squeezed into the Grand Canyon. If you did nothing but write up the dumb, inane, absurd, ridiculous and wrong statements Teddy Badgame has come up with over the past three years, you could pretty much fill the Internet, but only if you eliminated half the porn out there.
You don’t like Ted? Totally acceptable position. You want Ted to look bad? Feel free to have at it.
But really? His dad?
It’s this kind of stuff that makes politics a completely worthless read for me: Don’t focus on the issue. Focus on the person. Even more, it’s the kind of thing that keeps decent, normal people from deciding to run for stuff. For reasons past my understanding, it doesn’t seem to dissuade the whackjobs from giving it a shot, but still…
How many of us love our parents, but cringe at some of the stupid shit that comes out of their mouths? Or have a cousin who fucked up and landed in jail? Or have a grandparent who is wonderful in 99 ways but for some reason still uses the word “colored” to describe non-white people? Do you really want those people’s problems to be the stick by which you are measured? (Maybe in Ted’s case he does…)
Journalism is inordinately difficult when you have to dig in and pick out things that matter, analyze them, report them and then write them in a way that people will understand and act upon.
On the other hand, it’s really easy if all you’re doing is acting like the kid who spent all of third grade finding out that one guy in your class called another guy a “doodyhead” and then running over to that kid and saying, “Billy called you a doodyhead!” This approach comes with it the hope that Billy will then say, “Yeah, but Jimmy’s a SUPERdoody head” so that the “doodyhead war of words” will escalate to a full-on playground fight.
This explains why 95 percent of the “journalism” practiced around the week of the Super Bowl boils down to which idiot said something was “retarded” and if someone was “disrespecting” someone on another team. I mean, if everything goes right, you might get four or five stories out of this!
Rafael Cruz might think that Obama came from Kenya or it might have been a passing lame joke meant to egg on a group of like-minded anti-Obama idiots. It’s not like he was campaigning to this group in hopes of swaying undecideds.
Even if he thinks Obama is a socialistic Kenyan nationalist who putFoxy Brown, Jim Brown andBundini Brown into key roles of government, who gives a shit? Better yet, who SHOULD give a shit and WHY WOULD they give a shit?
And WHY is this a top story on CNN? Shouldn’t we expect deeper, better and stronger news out of a national news organization?