Ted Cruz, Asshole of the Day for August 11, 2014

by TeaPartyCat ()

You might be comforted by a headline like this— “Ted Cruz Thinks Impeaching Obama Is Pointless”— thinking it means that maybe, just maybe, Ted Cruz will be able to keep the House GOP Hater Caucus from forcing an impeachment that they’ll lose, and of course keep anything productive from happening in Washington for months.

And yes, I know that probably nothing productive would happen anyways.

But then after saying that impeachment is pointless because it won’t lead to conviction and removal in the Senate since Democrats will vote against it, Ted Cruz says this:

He also said it would highlight the administrations response to scandals.
"When a scandal breaks, the president says he’s outraged," Cruz said. "Step number two is stonewall at every front."

"And then, step number three: after stonewalling for many months, dismiss the entire issue as old news, no longer relevant, dredging up the past,” he continued. “That’s what they’re trying to do with the IRS. That’s what they’re trying to do with Benghazi. It’s wrong.”

Now you can say many things about Ted Cruz— arrogant, partisan, douchebag, asshole. But what you can’t claim is that he’s stupid. Which is why this statement is so offensive.
 
Cruz KNOWS that two weeks ago the House Intelligence Committee, with the unanimous support of all the Republicans, declared that there is no Benghazi scandal:

The House Intelligence Committee, led by Republicans, has concluded that there was no deliberate wrongdoing by the Obama administration in the 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, said Rep. Mike Thompson of St. Helena, the second-ranking Democrat on the committee…

Thompson said the report “confirms that no one was deliberately misled, no military assets were withheld and no stand-down order (to U.S. forces) was given.”

And Cruz knows there’s no IRS scandal either. The questions have been answered. To wit:

[L]et’s not forget what the IRS scandalette actually involved. There’s never been any credible allegation that anyone was audited because of their political beliefs. There’s never been any allegation that the IRS “targeted” donors to Republican super PACs. The worst thing that happened was that some Tea Party groups that had applied for 501(c)(4) status—claiming, utterly falsely, that they were charitable, non-political organizations, I might add—had to wait longer than they should have to get approval on their applications. (And, I have to repeat, when you’re waiting for your approval, you’re permitted under the law to act as though you’ve gotten your approval. You can raise and spend money, which they did.)

Aside from the wonderful term “scandalette,” Waldman gets to the rotten heart of the whole mania: the fact that Republicans are playing on the near-universal taxpayer fear of IRS audits, tax liens, asset seizures and so on, when there’s no evidence any of these agency weapons were utilized with respect to the allegedly “targeted” groups. As for taxpayers’ sympathy with the “victims” of IRS “targeting,” it really needs to be understood that they were almost entirely seeking to abuse a tax code loophole supposedly exempting “social welfare” entities when they were actually trying to play in electoral politics without disclosing donors.

So it’s not that Obama delays and these stories get dismissed as old before anything is learned. They get dismissed because investigations find that there is no scandal. None. There’s no scandal on Benghazi, and there’s no scandal at the IRS.

So the only scandal here is that guys like Ted Cruz keep pretending that the “scandals” haven’t been fully investigated. He acts like there’s scandalous questions that haven’t been answered. But they have all been answered. But by pretending that they are still out there, unanswered, he perpetuates the idea that there’s a scandal. And for that, Ted Cruz is the Asshole of the Day.
It is Ted Cruz’s 7th time as Asshole of the Day. Previous wins were for

• claiming victory in the government shutdown because he built a fundraising list
• protesting the consequences of the shutdown HE orchestrated
• claiming the shutdown he orchestrated will leave America vulnerable to a terrorist attack
• comparing Obamacare to the Nazis gassing 6 million Jews
• creating condescending memes to address the President like some i-can-haz teenager
• pretending an abortion bill with no provision to save the life of the mother is about women’s health

This is his first time being named Asshole of the Day since winning 2013 Asshole of the Year.

Full story: Talking Points Memo

Stephanie Doty
Weary of Wonderland
August 11, 2014
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