Friday night, the Adams County Republican Party's Lincoln Day Dinner was held in Thornton, attended by a slew of GOP 2014 candidates including gubernatorial candidates Scott Gessler and Greg Brophy, U.S. Senate candidates Ken Buck and Randy Baumgardner, and attorney general candidate Cynthia Coffman. The keynote address was delivered by Rafael Cruz, the father of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and sometimes mentioned as a possible candidate for office in his own right. Based on audio we were forwarded over the weekend, Cruz's speech to the Adams County GOP was…memorable to say the least. Transcribed excerpts:
RAFAEL CRUZ: So Barack Obama said: If the winds shift, I will side with the Muslims.
IN CROWD: He is Muslim!
CRUZ: [Exclamation] McCain couldn’t say that, because it's not politically correct. It is time to stop being politically correct! [Pols emphasis]
CRUZ: Our lives? Well, look at what’s happening with our lives. From the cradle, 55 million babies have been murdered by abortion since 1973. At the other end, Obamacare, with denying care to the elderly, with care being rationed, with care being postponed for 12 to 18 months, with care being controlled by a group of bureaucrats, that on the basis of cost/benefit, will decide whether you get a medical procedure or not, they’re destroying our end of life. As a matter of fact, one of the things in Obamacare is that the elderly, every five years you must have end-of-life counseling. Translation: suicide counseling! [Pols emphasis]
CRUZ: I know I am in a Republican Party meeting. If you want to throw tomatoes at me, throw tomatoes at me. But unfortunately, you cannot say that the Republican Party is without blame. We have too many RiNOs in the Republican Party!
CRUZ: They have their minds made up, and basically their idea is this: you’re too stupid and I know what I’m doing. Well I’ll tell you what, we the people are not stupid. We the people ought to be smart enough to throw them out of office, or primary them, and put constitutional conservatives in their place!
This is the kind of speech that would definitely make Colorado Republican Party chairman Ryan Call, you know, a little nervous. Demands for intraparty purges against "RiNO" Republicans (for the uninitiated, this stands for "Republican in Name Only"), and senselessly raging about such fictional items as Obamacare "suicide counseling," is very popular among the Colorado Republican grassroots today–as energizing to the party's base as it is repellent to most other voters. At the same time, the younger Cruz has emerged as a hero among the grassroots right for his prominent role in the threatened shutdown of the government to stop Obamacare from going into effect.
If you're a "mainstream" Republican who might otherwise side with Call on the base craziness issue, what do you do during this lunatic speech, knowing the base is ready to devour any hapless "RiNO" who dares disagree?
You smile and applaud, that's what.
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So that's where Ted gets it from. Listen to that crowd go wild at the talk of primaries!
They have met the enemy, and…
If they only had more pure Republicans run for office like Dan Maes then everything would be peachy.
What is interesting is that they supposedly are all about individualism but enforce groupthink. Sort of like Ayn Rand, in effect….
Heh. Skimming through this quickly, I thought you had written gopthink. Kind of a useful coin of phrase…
it's missing a t.
GOPthink. Brilliant. I'm giving you the credit.
http://www.cuba54.com/Con-Man-Cruz.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6mPgDFM9aw
It should be noted that everything Papa Cruz said about Obamacare is a lie.
The legislation has it's faults, but to get to where the Republican lies say it leads requires an impossible series of "what ifs".
If the legislation is so bad it shouldn't require outright falsehoods to criticize it. The R team is scared of it going into effect and people liking it. That's probably a big part of the impending government shutdown. States like ours with a fully implemented exchange will start selling Obamacare policies tomorrow regardless. What happens in the Confederate States of Teabag where the state government has abdicated its responsibility to its legions of uninsured who vote against their own interests, and have left it up to the Feds to run their exchange?
Precisely. If it goes into effect long before the 2014 election, by the time the election rolls around it will no longer be a big hysteria inducing deal except to those who would never vote for Dems anyway. Long before the 2016 presidential it will be just as accepted as medicare was. And that's not the worst of it for the GOP. If it catches on with younger voters like gay rights have, it could very well lead to even more reform, including the universal public option Obama proposed when he first ran in 2008.
They know they have to kill it now or the chance will be gone. So do Dems. Dems have the WH and the Senate. They just have to not blink. Listening to Obama not blinking right now. Or at least that's what it sounds like so far.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) program is mandatory not discreationary spending so it goes into effect across the nation regardless. There are a number of DailyKos diaries on this.
Yep. Rolling out right on schedule. Apparently they didn't think past the possibility that the Dems wouldn't cave and the grown ups couldn't get the wackos to understand that a shut down couldn't shut down Obamacare anyway. Now don't they look kind of silly after all the carrying on about how shutting down the government to stop Obamacare would be worth it and here the government is shut down but Obamacare doesn't have a scratch on it?
What are they going to tell all their base now? That this whole fight has been a sham from start to finish? That they're the ones who are going to have to cave pretty soon? Did you see Boehner's pathetically short presser? He needs to talk to dwyer. He'll no doubt feel much better than he seemed to tonight after dwyer explains to him how this is really another brilliant GOP triumph and every Dem in the country is doomed.
"Denying care to the elderly, rationed care, care controlled by bureaucrats, suicide counselling," translation "Get your government hands off my medicare!" It is often repeated because it is true. The heart and soul of the tea party anti-Obamacare movement are people depending on the largest, most bureaucatic, government run health care system ever implemented.
Wow. Head shaking wow.
Give him 50 pounds, a bible, and a megachurch and you have…John Hagee.
It is the sme message, folks. Just a different pulpit..
Yeah this is bound to resonate beyond the wacko base, right?
I think so. Not in as lagre a splash as the "47%" romney gaffe, but significantly. Talking points accompanied by personal attacks must be accurate, or the blowback is very severe.
You can get away with calling names to a point, but if your basic tenets, IE cruz sr.'s statements about the ACA, you come off as creepy.
That's what happened there. The reaction was "Makin' stuff up, eh, boy, the apple don't fall far from the tree".
The old gasbag's a lot like ryan's mom. No credibility. Maddow will use this, and it will take on a life of its' own.
Relatives should remember there's allways a recording device in the room.
same …not sme
Maybe I should have stuck around for the keynote….oh well.
Seventeen posts and not a single comparison to John Sununu….