krebscycle

Ted Cruz’s father is his main political advisor and is a heavy hitter in Republican circles in his own right. He is also a Dominianist Cultist who believes that members of his “Christian” sect are supposed to rule the lesser peoples (everyone else) and that his son, Ted, has been “annointed by God” to be King. The US public has no idea about these things because the media never brings it up.  Senator Cruz is free to have his father make the cult circuit, and bridge that to Republican funders and big shots, while he camps on TV acting the part of a mainstream conservative.  This is a classic example of how the media permits Republicans to dual stream – pandering to an extremist base essentially in private  while the media politely averts its eyes.  Cruz Jr. is not even required to publicly state whether he believes the US is a “Christian nation”, whether a Muslim or Jewish President would be Constitutional, or even if he considers Catholics and mainstream Protestants to be Christians. Cruz Jr. is free to pose as that promised God-given Theocrat to the crazies and then act the Constitutional Lawyer for the TV cameras.  When someone, like a reporter for the marginalized Mother Jones magazine, dares to question him about what Rafael Sr. says, his office can deny it, or call it “out of context” and the same media that gave hundreds of hours of air time to non-scandals like Benghazi or to Obama’s ties with Reverend Wright, politely claps and goes on to something else.

The same thing happened when Paul Ryan let the mask slip and, told far right wing radio host Bill Bennet:

“Your buddy Charles Murray or Bob Putnam over at Harvard, those guys have written books on this. Which is, we have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working and learning the value and culture of work. “So, there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

 He didn’t have to wink and follow with “if you know what I mean”, because the meaning was obvious.  Just in case you might not be clear on who Murray is, here’s a summary from the Southern Poverty Law Center:

Charles Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has become one of the most influential social scientists in America, using racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor. According to Murray, disadvantaged groups are disadvantaged because, on average, they cannot compete with white men, who are intellectually, psychologically and morally superior.

To many of Ryan’s listeners, the message of “we want to stop sending your tax dollars to lazy black guys” would have been crystal clear. Now maybe Ryan is referring to some other work by Murray and he rejects Murray’s race tracts. Maybe he just doesn’t know about rural poverty in the USA. Maybe, by  “inner city men” he meant rich trust fund recipients living on the upper east side of Manhattan.  Maybe he really meant to discuss the decline of bowling leagues.  I guess that’s possible, but our media allowed him to remain unclear – just a pro-forma “I was inarticulate” was good enough to close the topic.   And Jon Chait got hysterical when pushed on the idea that one could presume that the Republican party relied on the racial animosity of a significant part of its supporters in order to win elections.

None of this is new. During the 2000 Presidential campaign, George W. Bush sprinkled his speeches with garbled slogans of the extreme anti-choice movement and the press insisted on treating these as charming moments of, um, inarticulateness. Ronald Reagan was able to comence his Presidential campaign in a small Mississippi town where civil rights workers had been murdered and invoke “states rights” while the media pretended to believe he was talking about  theories of constitutional federalism. Especially on racial matters, the media affects a level of naivete and clueless that would have impressed the censors at the Soviet era Pravda. This is from the Financial Times during the 2012 election:

One of the better answers I have found comes from a well-known supporter of Mr Romney – Suzy Welch, former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review, and wife of Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”. I would imagine this is why Mr Romney’s campaign included the snippet of Mr Obama singing “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They hoped it would convey his otherness. “It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”

Some people just don’t like popular songs from the 1970s, nothing to do with race here at all. And yet, there is the liberal Jon Chait explaining that we must never impute racial motifs to such Republican themes  as “tax cuts” because, well, because that would be “insane”. These Republicans must be granted the benefit of the doubt because – well because journalists who call them on their doubletalk lose their jobs. Simple as that.