Ted Cruz, the junior Senator from Texas, has only ever known political adversity. His supporters would tell you it’s because Ted is a fighter and holds to his principles. But in reality, the political fights Senator Cruz has gotten himself into are largely of his own making. Cruz, for all of his populist, Tea Party-style rhetoric, is in fact a very “focus-grouped” candidate.
Statements are crafted very carefully, videos are shot from the very best angles, and even 90 seconds of a Ted Cruz piece of oratory conjures a mental image of the Canadian-born Cuban whose real name is Rafael practicing in a full-length mirror until his wife Heidi calls him to come to bed. Rafael’s face does a lot of acting:
That was Ted during the 2016 presidential primary, denouncing Donald Trump’s lying, deceitful ways, his running mate Carly Fiorina standing sternly at his shoulder.
What could make Ted invite the guy he’s talking about in that video clip down to Texas to campaign for him in advance of the midterm elections? In a word, desperation. Ted is, for lack of a better phrase, freaking out right now that his opponent, Beto O’Rourke, is within a point of him in the polls in deep-red Texas, the heart of conservative America.
Maybe that’s why Ted just got caught releasing a totally faked video of Beto at a town hall in a high school gymnasium in El Paso from August 31.
It’s reminiscent of when Trump sycophant James O’Keefe selectively edited videos of himself and his assistants interacting with community organizers at ACORN in order to get them shut down, or when O’Keefe spliced together different parts of videos to make it look like Planned Parenthood employees were “selling baby parts.” Both of those efforts were of course easily disproved in court and in fact, O’Keefe was sentenced to a hefty fine and three years’ probation after attempting to enter a Democrat Senator’s office in disguise to tap her phones.
Ted’s dirty trick was nowhere near as complicated as a Project Veritas scheme. His campaign simply took footage of the town hall, used a part of it where a guy asks about flag-burning, and then clumsily spliced on the very end of a much more complex answer from O’Rourke, at which point he’s already talking about something else entirely:
You can actually spot in the video that O’Rourke is standing in a different spot when the shot comes back to him. It’s a ham-handed effort by Team Cruz, although it is inexplicably still up on Ted’s official Facebook page, despite the Dallas Morning News, Ted’s own paper of record, calling him out for using “43 of 143 words from the question, and 24 of 615 words from the answer.”
It’s shameful, but we’re in a new era of politics. It’s adversarial. And apparently, it’s as full of lies as Donald Trump’s social media accounts.
Featured image via screen capture
