Ted Cruz – Tea Party or Neocon Internationalist?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – This is a controversy that happened yesterday between Senator Hagel, Senator Inhofe, Senator Cruz and I think Senator McCain is involved or maybe Senator Nelson at some point.  This is over the nomination of Senator Hagel to be Secretary of Defense.  If you haven’t heard this, it’s quite acrimonious.  You’re going to hear one senator accusing another of some manner of un-gentleman-like behavior.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

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Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  I want to get one more piece of audio in here.  This is a rather lengthy piece.  This is a controversy that happened yesterday between Senator Hagel, Senator Inhofe, Senator Cruz and I think Senator McCain is involved or maybe Senator Nelson at some point.  This is over the nomination of Senator Hagel to be Secretary of Defense.  If you haven’t heard this, it’s quite acrimonious.  You’re going to hear one senator accusing another of some manner of un-gentleman-like behavior.

[start audio clip]

Senator Cruz: Mr. Chairman, if I may be heard on the point of personal privilege.

Chairman Senator Levin: Call on Senator Inhofe.

Senator Inhofe: I just wanted to make one observation.   My friend Senator Nelson was, I think I wrote down the words, criticizing our senator there for implying that Chuck Hagel was cozy with terrorist-type countries, referring to Iran.  I’d say he’s endorsed by them.  You can’t get any cozier than that.

Senator Cruz: Mr. Chairman, if I —

Chairman Senator Levin: I’ve been endorsed by people I disagree with totally.  I don’t want people who hate me to ruin my career by endorsing me.

Senator Cruz: Mr. Chairman —

Chairman Senator Levin: Senator Cruz?

[end audio clip]

Mike:  That’s just a little snippet.  AG, do you have any details on this?  I only heard this this morning when you were playing MSNBC audio.

AG:  With the hearings of Hagel, Cruz has criticized him for not disclosing some of his past funding and speeches given, and led the discussion along the lines of him being funded by radicals that are not pro-American.  The next step was that if Hagel would be confirmed, it could make military conflict substantially more likely in the next couple of years.  That then led Senator Nelson to say Cruz had crossed the line by questioning the patriotism of Hagel.  It was kind of a back and forth.  Senator Levin then chimed in and said: Well, if we give attention to all those that support me, I don’t endorse necessarily everyone that supports my stance on issues; that’s an irrational line of reasoning to take.  So kind of a back-and-forth there.  Cruz is making his name known in these circles.  I would say he’s sounding a lot like Rubio has in terms of cozying up to the McCain and Graham.

Mike:  These people just can’t get enough war.  They can’t get enough threat of war.  They can’t get enough violence in their lives.  They can’t get enough action overseas.  There’s no problem, nothing out there that doesn’t require our military attention.  You may say, [mocking] “Come on, Mike, we have enemies.”  Fine.  Common defense, 48 states, defend them to the death, to the end.  Defend the coast.  Make a navy, submarines, whatever you have to do.  What they are talking about has been a meddlesome and interventionist policy that has now cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans, cost the limbs of tens of thousands of immeasurable cost in life and limb and treasure.  All this because we won’t explore our own natural resources?  All this so that we may continue to manufacture arms that we don’t need?  We do still make and account for 43 percent of the known universe’s military spending, 43 percent.  $217 trillion in the hole, $16.2 trillion about to go up to $20 trillion in direct cash payments in the hole.  We can’t stop making fighter planes.  We can’t stop our overseas meddling.  We just can’t stop any of it.  These guys want to continue it?  No, they want to ramp it up.  Senator Hagel poses a mild impediment to this.

By the way, I might point out that it is the Congress, sir, Senator Cruz, read the damn Constitution, the Congress that declares wars.  Unless the secretary of defense wants to be brought up on charges of sedition or impeached for dereliction of duty, if you declare a war, he will comply, as will the president.  He has to, he doesn’t have a choice.  Andrew, do you see my point?  This is how ridiculous this is.  If McCain and company can persuade their countrymen that we ought to go bomb the bejesus belt out of Iran, fund and raise a ten million man expeditionary force and go over there and do this in an orderly fashion, invade and occupy or whatever it is these nitwits dream up, the secretary of defense cannot stop that, he doesn’t have the power.  The president doesn’t have the power to stop it.  Only in vetoing an act could he stop it, and then he could be overwritten.  It is the congress that has the power to declare war.  The secretary of defense doesn’t.  That’s how screwed up our system is.  They’re trying to make the point, [mocking] “He won’t bomb those brown people when we need him to.”  It’s not his job to do that.  That’s your job, to tell him to do that.

AG:  The thing I take away from this — as the election was getting underway, and in particular the runoff for the Texas Republican nomination, there were a number of articles that came out that said Cruz may sound great now but understand he is looking to make a name for himself.  When he was part of the Bush administration as governor of Texas, he was front and center, first one to get interviewed talking about his beliefs.  The idea that he’s some sort of homegrown Tea Party guy is just flat out not true.

Mike:  He’s an internationalist.  He’s a globalist, no doubt about it.

AG:  This article was saying he’s always been about himself.  Whatever cause is most popular, he jumps to that cause, whether it was George Bush’s form of being a Republican when that was popular, that’s what he was.  Now that he’s a Tea Party guy, that’s what he is.  To be in the Senate for a month and be making these waves, McCain even scolded him for going after Hagel’s patriotism for Hagel having some support from people within Iran.

Mike:  By the way, Andrew, of the two, which one has actually seen bullets flying at him from an enemy in combat?

AG:  That would be McCain.

Mike:  No, of Hagel and Cruz.

AG:  Hagel.  We’ve got a lot of Cruz fans, but I would ask all of them to go and read these articles that talk about his past as him being, in essence, a political social butterfly and flocking to what is popular, being all about himself.  If his first couple weeks in the Senate are any indication, hard to disagree with that.  He is staking a place right now that is in no way, foreign policy-wise, what I think the Tea Party would stand for, and definitely not what the endorsements of Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Mike Lee would have thought was coming when they endorsed him.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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