The Truth Behind Ted Cruz’s Lies
Ana Marie Cox
The junior senator from Texas is running for president. Heres why his lies matter.
Oh happy dayfreshman Texas Senator Ted Cruz is set to announce that hes running for president. And hes not going to announce at the Alamo or any other defiant Texas-type monument. Hes making a pilgrimage straight to the birthplace of the Moral Majority, the Jerry Falwell-founded Liberty University. The setting makes sense for a man who believes that God has called him to politics. After all, the only way to top shutting down the government is to try to run the government into the ground himself.
This month, Cruz released a short video thats the best evidence yet for what a Cruz presidential campaign might be like. Its called A Time for Truth, and the title has to be intentional irony.
Cruzs Politifact
track record for publicly-asserted falsehoods is the second-highest among front-runners, totaling 56 percent of all statements theyve looked at. The only other leading contender with a higher rating is Ben Carson, who has a 100 percent pants on fire
history, the result mainly of his brief time in the national spotlight and only having given Politifact one assertion to checkthat people choose to be gay. (The investigative process on verifying that claim could have been entertaining, had Carson taken up Dan Savages
invitation to take a very personal version of the Pepsi Challenge. Politifact chose a less experiential approach.)
Its not just Cruzs habit of embellishment that makes the videos title more wish-fulfillment than description. One would expect a video entitled
A Time for Truth to contain, you know,
truth. Or calls to speak the truth, at the very least. Cruzs infomercial, on the other hand, is simply a collection of Cruz clips wherein he apparently confuses speaking the truth with
speaking very dramatically and forcefully. It is the Ugly American approach to foreign language in moral form.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/22/the-truth-behind-ted-cruz-s-lies.html