I’m beginning to feel the Cruzmentum. Not just because he renounced his Canadian citizenship so that he can campaign to become a natural born American preznit, but also because of this, from Cruz’s school days:
“I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?” Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”
Yes, it was a long time ago and I don’t care much about Cruz’s Tigertone days, but I’m hoping that Cruz doubles down on this to the point where not only Beck and Hannity but even serious conservatives like Bobo and Joe Scar start telling us “But Karl Marx WAS a satanist”.
Alexandra
I think you can get an ointment for that.
Emma
There might be a not-insignificant number of Americans who believe him. Everything is being cast as an Apocalyptic battle so as to appeal to the religious maniacs.
aimai
SteveM had a very good post up about this. Its loopier than you can imagine. Including rhetorical proof embedded right in Marx’s own words and his beard.
NotMax
@Emma
There’s more than likely a not insignificant number of Americans who believe Karl was the 6th Marx brother.
debbie
His physical resemblance to Joseph McCarthy is all anyone needs to know.
Alexandra
As it’s a DougJ thread, it needs to be pointed out that wingnuttia thinks he’s dreamy, also:
How long till Bobo and Joe Scar start to swoon over those shoulders they could land their aircrafts on?
Emma
@NotMax: There’s that. But those don’t tend to vote for the candidate most likely to trigger end times.
hildebrand
@Emma: 27%
Baud
Still talking about anal glands, I see.
J.D. Rhoades
From Marx and Satan (the English translation):
Comedian Yakov Smirnoff:
Ergo, Yakoff Smirnoff was a minion of the Devil. I knew it!
Doug Milhous J
@Alexandra:
Where are those quotes from? I love them.
Baud
@J.D. Rhoades:
Ask not what your country can do for you …
Steve Crickmore
I expect the right wing wackos, with their consistency to say that this is non issue; it doesn’t matter where senatorTed Cruz was physically born? He could have born in Angola, for all it matters, as he is “natural born American”, virtue of his mother being an American from Delaware, even if his father were Cuban, and therfore perfectly entitled to run for the presidency and be the president.
Infamous Heel-Filcher
I’m not familiar with this particular pamphlet, but the general kind of claim (that such-and-such-an-idea is really run by a secret cabal with the goal of overthrowing the state/the church/all that is good and holy) is very familiar to me.
When I was a seminarian, a fellow in the same year as me had been brought up to believe that the Freemasons were locked in life and death battle with the Catholic Church. Smart guy, too. Left the seminary, last I heard he was practicing law somewhere.
Authoritarians need enemies. The boogedy-boogedier the better.
sharl
It looks like Cruz might have triple citizenship!
JPL
The day that a former roommate speaks out about Cruz he decides to release his birth certificate. hmmmm
Dead Ernest
@ Doug J.
Yet another inspired post title Doug.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
@Alexandra:
What is it with these conservatives and their repressed homosexuality? All they think about is gay sex–with a thought here and there about how manly and dreamy this or that Republican dude is. What a bunch of fucked up, self loathing weirdos.
Something else that I thought of when reading the link: Cruz is the worst, most dangerous kind of demagogue: He has the demogogue’s skill at working ustable people into a froth for his ends, but what’s worse is that he believes the bullshit he says all the time. An everyday demogogue is bad enough, but the true believers are really scary.
Napoleon
@sharl:
That is sweet. Now that they have got him to say he will disavow his Canadian citizenship he now needs to be pressed on Cuba. My guess is he will refuse to do it for Cuba.
Alexandra
@Doug Milhous J:
From various comments I found through teh Google, one on The Blaze. Another one in a piece here:
http://www.westernfreepress.com/2013/06/18/rubio-fades-ted-cruz-shines/
Try ‘ted cruz handsome’. Other word combinations might hit an even more juicier mother-lode. Still chuckling over the description of Breitbart’s chisel-blue eyes…
Knew you couldn’t resist. ;)
Soonergrunt
Being the son of a Cuban national, Raphael E. Cruz inherited Cuban citizenship at birth, according to Cuban law. Yet the citizenship he renounced was…Canadian?
So he’s still a citizen of Castro’s Cuba.
PaulW
I honestly don’t care if Cruz is Canadian or Cuban. I only care that he’s a dangerous idiot.
Woodrowfan
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.):
Yep, he is a very, very scary man. And I thought Cheney was evil. Cruz and his nutso fascist dad take it to an even higher level. They’re the kind of people who not only shove people into ovens, they think they’re doing God’s work when they do so.
eric
I would point out that Christianity was born in the belief that the Final Battle was imminent. That was the teaching of John to Jesus and that was the Hope that Jesus preached, i.e., that soon roman shackles would would surrender to His Judgment. One of the great theological problems over the the last 2000 years has been reconciling Christ’s divine correctness with the obvious fact that he was wrong about the imminence of Judgment. Over that same time, you have true believers of all stripes crying out “this is it!, the end is nigh.” It serves to glorify the believers personally as Saved and the epoch in which they live as special. So they deify their heroes as more than men (always men), so with Cruz I think you will see it particularly strong because he is a true warrior…the Christ returning for Judgment on horseback wielding swords of justice. That is the Christ the American Right worships, not the Christ washing the feet of the disenfranchised.
hildebrand
I am waiting for the Paulites to start tearing into Cruz. These are two camps that harbor the belief that their guy is the savior of the nation, and as said so eloquently in the Dire Straits song, Industrial Disease, “Two of them say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong.” The fight between those two, once it gets going (we are getting a foretaste with the Paul/Christie spat), is going to be delicious.
Chris
@Emma:
I’m fairly sure there are. The fundiegelicals I knew saw Satan pretty much everywhere, from the Virginia Tech shooter (they thought he was possessed) to the Muslim Students Association (they thought if I went to the Eid dinner I’d be endorsing The Evil One). It’s one of the more fucked up but fairly real parts of their worldview.
Alexandra
Hah. The NPR tote-baggers have also started:
http://m.npr.org/story/168370534
LMFAO!
Chris
@Woodrowfan:
I got that same vibe from Huckabee in 2008. I guess there’s always one.
Baud
@hildebrand:
I was thinking about that the other day. They’re competing for the same demo, I think.
Linda Featheringill
Marx a satanist? Hah!
Ol’ Chuck would have probably considered Satan the ultimate purveyor of exploitation. Almost as bad as The Church.
eric
@Baud: an equally frightening thought is that one of them could replace Mcconnell as GOP leader in the Senate and even more frightening if it is as majority leader. Here I would bet on Cruz.
SFAW
What I want to know is: what’s this “um Satanista” shit? Is that an archaic form of “un” and my Spanish knowledge is substandard? Or were
Wormtongue’sWurmbrand’s translators just a bunch of hacks? Or perhaps “um” is peculiar to the Romanian dialect of Spanish? Or is Cruz really a native speaker of Portuguese? (Lessee … Canadia, Cuba, Murika, and Brazil/Azores/Portugal/Angola? Angola? Maybe that’s why DreamyRugged Ted has a picture of Jonas Savimbi in his office? But I digress. Majorly.)Inquiring minds don’t really want to know, however.
KCinDC
I don’t understand what we’d gain if “serious” conservatives embraced yet another bit of craziness as something perfectly reasonable. They’ve been doing it for years now. It’s gotten scary enough that it no longer provides entertainment, and it doesn’t really damage them, since the media just incorporate it into their narrative of left-right false balance. All it does it make our political environment crazier and drive us further right.
J
@debbie: Glad to see others noticing this. The resemblance to tail gunner Joe is uncanny!
KCinDC
@SFAW, look at the text at the bottom. It’s clearly Portuguese: words like “edição” are not Spanish (Spanish would be “edición”).
Baud
@eric:
I see more filibuster reform in our future.
Botsplainer
@Linda Featheringill:
Took me a minute to work that out. Nice play.
SFAW
@KCinDC:
Thanks! As an old fart, my eyes don’t work quite as well as they used to.
So that brings us back to: is Rafi a one-man sleeper cell for the Jonas Savimbi Martyr’s Legion? And if so, when will people come to realize that Raif/Jonas are/were all about overthrowing the Government?
schrodinger's cat
Didn’t Niall Ferguson tell us that we can’t trust Keynes because he had no children and could have been gay. So by the token shouldn’t we trust Marx because he had many children?
schrodinger's cat
@Alexandra: Is intense the new crazy?
Steeplejack (tablet)
@SFAW:
It’s Portuguese.
Randy P
@SFAW: No, that picture and the associated caption are Portuguese, not Spanish. I was about to nitpick that.
djork
When I was in middle school, I attended a friend’s Southern Baptist youth group a few times. One of meetings that was held was literally titled, “Mikhail Gorbachev: Antichrist.” This theory was entirely based on some weird numerology (the irony of which was lost on me at the time) and the birthmark / mark of the beast.
CaseyL
The fundies were absolutely certain Jesus was going to come back at the turn of the millenium, and they’ve been pissed off ever since that he didn’t.
Being fundies, they can’t accept or comprehend that they were, and continue to be, wrong. So they’re going to : a) punish the world for not fulfilling their Apocalyptic fantasies; and b) do as much damage as possible because then, then!, Jesus will just have to come back to save them.
This happened in 1000, too. Millenial Fever was a real thing, and so was the hangover. In fact, I think the First Crusade was motivated largely by a belief that “liberating the Holy Land” would bring Jesus back.
Doug Milhous J
@Alexandra:
No teleprompter!
El Cid
Of course Karl Marx was a Satanist. Look at all the secret meetings he attended. What, you think they were all talking about workers’ power or something? No, that’s just what he told his suffering wife. It was all baby-sacrificing, all of it.
sharl
I wouldn’t dismiss this Cuban connection lightly. From WaPo earlier this year, the story of GS-14 DoD employee and Cuban spy Ana Montes.
And then there is this clearly thoughtful and totally credible-sounding analysis, Al-Qaeda’s Cuban connection: terrorism with a Latin beat.
As a famous Tennessee law prof and fan of sexytime robots might say*, “disturbing if true”.
I’m thinking this is like Manchurian Candidate, but for real, and with a Latin beat. Beware of this man!
(*maybe he DID in fact say this!)
Citizen_X
@Alexandra:
Oh, perfect. Like Tony Robbins doesn’t induce a gag reflex in millions of Americans already.
eemom
I think it might work to his disadvantage. Makes him look too crazy to be President.
(heh heh — had you going for a second there, didn’t I…)
The Red Pen
@CaseyL:
My theory? Jesus did come back, was totally disgusted and left for good. Really, that could have happened any time in the last 2000 years.
Also, too: Freeper go apeshit with Cruz birtherism. It’s delicious irony. Cruz is a great kinda-brown hope for the Republican Party and the crazy base is already attacking him for stupid shit they invented to smear Obama.
amk
I wonder who is propping this teabaagger more, the right or the left? He is a 100% nutso and will falme out just like all other extremist nutters well before the next GE. 2016 is too far away to chicken little about this teabagger now.
NotMax
@The Red Pen
Obligatory link.
One more time, the Chad Mitchell Trio singing The John Bitch Society.
schrodinger's cat
Is Tony Robbins some kind of a televangelist? or is that Joel Osteen?
Thoroughly Pizzled
Cruz was one of the lackeys of Robbie George (i.e. the National Organization for Marriage guy whose argument against gay marriage is based entirely on LEGOs.) The craziness runs deep.
Ruviana
@Alexandra: I always thought Cruz had a sneery smarmy face. Every time I see him I feel an intense urge to slap it. Didn’t pick up on the resemblance to Tailgunner Joe but now that it’s been pointed out I can see it clearly.
Hunter Gathers
I am pro-Satanist, BTW. Satan has the best weed.
Paul in KY
@NotMax: Groucho, Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, Gummo, Karlo!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
That would be quite entertaining during the GOP primaries to see a “serious” discussion in the press over if atheism isn’t just Satanism. Watch the libertarians squirm.
Paul in KY
@eric: I think you are misinterpreting that. Jesus never said there would be any kind of ‘earthly’ overthrowing or comuppance of the Romans. The Pharisees knew that, as did the citizens of Jeruselem. That is why they wanted the Zealot (who most definitely was for an actual, physical removal of Roman overlordship) spared, instread of Jesus.
That’s my take on it.
smintheus
Hilarious that a self-styled legal ‘genius’ would pretend that he didn’t know he was a Canadian citizen by birth.
Even more ridiculous when you consider that he worked for the Bush White House and thus had to undergo a security clearance. Did he lie? Did he just disbelieve the Canadian birth certificate he presumably had to supply with his application? Did the vetters really not notice that he’s a dual citizen?
The Red Pen
@schrodinger’s cat:
Robbins is kind of a “secular televangelist.” He offers fluffy self-help workshops that cost a lot of money.
Joel Osteen is a televangelist/megachurch pastor who pushes a defanged version of Christianity designed to get people who need a morale boost to attend his church for a month and drop their paychecks into his collection buckets. If you Google for images, you will note that Osteen does not display any Christian symbols on his stage.
It’s a shame, because Osteen’s father was a pretty decent pastor, as Texas Baptists go. John Osteen founded Lakewood Baptist as an independent Baptist church because of the Southern Baptist policies of segregation. John wanted his church to be open to people of any color.
Joel is interested in only one color: green.
Kropadope
@The Red Pen: In the age of the internet, no “Jesus” could have the influence or the depth of cultural penetration needed to save us all at once. This is why Jesus moved to the “personal savior” model. No, not the fundamentalist oath, but rather it expresses itself daily in the acts of compassion and understanding of people you see every day. Jesus was a teacher and one can learn from even the most imperfect vehicle. Now, if you’re waiting for a rapture, for god to blink its eye and for us all to be gone, well god is on, at minimum, a geological time scale, so a blink of its eye may be a while.
thalarctos (not the other one)
Marx a Satanist? Are you kidding me? In that photograph, he looks more like Santa to me…
shortstop
Hey, is FlipYrWhig quoted in this story?
Despite my general hatred for physical violence, I must observe that Ted Cruz has the most punchable face I’ve ever seen.
kindness
Any thread that starts with a Grateful Dead lyric is a good thread.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Red Pen:
A popcorn time
A Freeper @ “You’re talking to someone that knows more on the subject than you. I’ve already posted as have others the statutes and their requirements numerous times.”
Each and every one of them is an expert on the topic.
They also keep on referring to “The Law of Nations”; I assume this is some book that helps one “understand” the “original intent” of the Constitution (as in what Jesus meant when He gave The Constitution to the Founding Fathers(tm) ) Anyone know more about this?
Rorgg
Was Karl Marx Brazilian?
That photo, I’m about 99% sure, is in PORTUGESE, not Spanish.
kindness
@Hunter Gathers:
Not if you believe The Charlie Daniels Band.
Rorgg
@SFAW:
That jumped at me, too. I also noticed Çs and tilded as in there. That’s not Espanyollee.
StringOnAStick
I just don’t get where the “handsome ” part comes from RE: Cruz. Dude has creepy lips and is really unattractive in my eyes. Maybe I’m just seeing his “soul-ugly” leaking out.
Redshirt
There’s so much to laugh about Freepers, but consider them going out and reading “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinksy. I’d never heard of Alinsky before the Wingnuts took up his charge, and now he’s become part of the Liberal Totems to Evil, alongside the ever insidious Soros, Pelosi, and the rest.
J R in WV
Hi Doug J NixoJohnobambush,
“even serious conservatives like Bobo and Joe Scar”
So you’re telling us that Brooks and Scarberries are serious conservatives?
My Dad was a serious conservative, he worked for Nelson Rockefeller. I doubt Joe Scar even knows who Nelson was.
There aren’t any serious conservatives, just rightwing grifters and conmen.
Have a nice day.
schrodinger's cat
@Redshirt: I had never heard of Alinsky either, but for that matter
I had never heard of Burke and Oakeshott. My background is is in physics not political philosophy of the wingnuttia.
schrodinger's cat
@StringOnAStick: Agreed, but the beltway media found Fred Thompson handsome, there is no accounting for their taste.
Redshirt
@schrodinger’s cat: A far better background. The more I learn of politics the more I realize it is nothing but a tool for greed and fear.
schrodinger's cat
@CaseyL: If Jesus were to come back he probably would want nothing to do with them.
kindness
@J R in WV: Huh? Nelson Rockefeller was considered a liberal in the Republican party.
The Red Pen
@Kropadope: I like your take on the subject!
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
“The Law of Nations” is a book by a French political philosopher named Vattel. Some of them skip the middleman and appeal directly to “natural law.”
All of this is very much how catholic and orthodox Christian churches apply the works of the Church Fathers to get closer to the original intent of Christianity.
Of course, the Founding Fathers were not encoding divine truths, but trying to design a system of government that could remain stable and just due to both its intrinsic architecture, but also by changing over time to adjust to externalities.
Ironically, the people taking this pseudo-religious view of the Constitution, reject “tradition” in Christianity and couldn’t name a Church Father if you wrote out his name phonetically on a cue card.
The Red Pen
@schrodinger’s cat:
Everything I know about Alinsky, I learned on Free Republic.
Interestingly, one of the “rules for radicals,” is “use their own rules against them.” For example, if they create a labyrinth of bizarre rules about who is eligible for president, you could use these to get them to attack one of their own leaders.
Anybodybuther2016
So. He’s funny looking, that alone will keep him out of the whitehouse.
01jack
@Anybodybuther2016:
Well, the little guy was kinda funny-lookin’.
In what way?
I dunno… just funny-lookin’.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Red Pen:
Excellent, so its one of the “secret books your aren’t supposed to read!” things. I would be shocked if I hadn’t seen a Fundamentalist do this to some document at work.
VividBlueDotty
Even though I know better, every time one of my aquaintances or Facebook friends praises Cruz, I just say, yeah, too bad he can’t be President. It’s funny how none of them ever says “What do you mean” or argues that he can and why. They don’t know and they’re embarrassed that they don’t know. So it’s an effective way to shut down the conversation (for now.)
Jockey Full of Malbec
@eric:
Revelations is an allegory about the Fall of Rome.
I take great pleasure in telling Christians that their Apocalypse has already come and gone… It happened in 313 AD, with the Edict of Milan.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
huh, I just saw a picture of Ted Cruize – What’s with all the Cruize lust? No way is a man with a face like like that that going to be elected president. He just looks weak willed.
jonas
I remember back in high school in the 80s there was this Romanian guy whose had escaped the Ceaucescu regime with his parents when he was young and they were just like the Cubans — frothing anti-Communists and super religious — and he once told me in all earnestness that what people in the US didn’t realize was that Karl Marx was really a satanic sorcerer who invented Communism, in a pact with the devil, as a way to enslave humanity and destroy Christian civilization.
He was totally fucking serious. I was like “oooooookaaay, dude, whatever.” So evidently, this is a little bee in the bonnets of a lot of refugees from communist countries in the 70s and 80s. It would be interesting to know how it started.
Bobby Thomson
@J R in WV: ?? Rockefeller was never conservative.
schrodinger's cat
@jonas: I knew a Bulgarian guy in graduate school who was like that, he also seriously believed in Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
jonas
Also, too, it’s fun to point out to teatard types, particularly when, like Paul Ryan, they also consider themselves devout Christians, that the occultist Anton La Vey, founder of the infamous “Church of Satan”, was a huge fan of Ayn Rand and used her objectivist philosophy as the basis of his own brand of (non-theistic) satanism. And Rand herself was vehemently anti-religious and anti-Christian in particular.
So who’s running around promoting satanism again?
nastybrutishntall
Thanks for the earworm by induction.
polyorchnid octopunch
Wait, he’s going to renounce his Canadian citizenship? Why, that’s fantastic news!
Did I happen to mention I’m a Canadian?
Cheers!
Shortstop
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Weak-willed and simultaneously smarmy and self-righteous. An adult version of the kid face that would be saying, “I know you are, but what am I?” or “I’m telling Mom.”
FlipYrWhig
@shortstop: No, but Craig Mazin (quoted at the beginning and end of the piece) told me the Satanist story in 1988. And he said that the Daily Beast chose not to use what he told them about Cruz leaving an actual greasy film on everything he touched.
Shortstop
@FlipYrWhig: Ha! Why would they omit a piece of color like that?!
FlipYrWhig
@Shortstop: They probably didn’t believe it. It’s suspiciously metaphorical. But Craig told me at the time that their shared phone was always all funky.
Villago Delenda Est
@shortstop:
More punchable than Sean Hannity?
pacem appellant
@Randy P: I made a comment over at SteveM‘s place, too. That text is Portuguese, not Spanish. I’m not saying that Señor Cruz didn’t read it in Spanish, just that he probably didn’t read it in Portuguese.
Bubblegum Tate
@The Red Pen:
I did not know that. Good for John Osteen. Shame his son turned out to be such a greasy douchebag.
Bubblegum Tate
@01jack:
“So you were havin’ sex with the little fella?”
“Yah!”
I love that scene. Hell, I love that whole movie.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Shortstop: That sells on Fox for the base enough to be senator, but you got to have that Alpha Male(tm) look to be pres. Cruz is going to look like a dork next to someone like Perry to the point people will ignore what Perry says. This is like Christy’s weight.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Mumphrey, et al.)
@The Red Pen:
That’s pathetic and uproarious at the same time. Some wouldn’t care if he were, as one poster put it, “from Mars,” others don’t want anybody who wasn’t physically born in the U.S.; at least one wants “natural born citizen” to mean somebody born in the U.S. to parents, both of whom were citizens and both of whom were born in the U.S.; most of them still think President Obama still has either British citizenship, Indonesian citizenship or both, but not American citizenship; they all still believe his birth certificate is fake…
What a lot of pitiful fuckups. It depresses me every time I read shit like that and think that those people vote. Oof. As the saying goes, This is why we can’t have nice stuff…
shortstop
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Oh, I wasn’t suggesting there was anything electable about his mug — I was mostly explaining why I’d said farther up in the thread that it was a face begging for a smack.
JMS
Wow–I didn’t know Ted Cruz personally (I knew of him–I think most people did. He was an ass even then, and there were rumors…I think they were about him?). I did know Craig, a little, since we were in the same eating club. I had no idea they were roommates–how horrible. Makes me glad that my first roommate was a nice (liberal) woman. We also had a guy in our class who killed his own parents, so I suppose Ted has some competition for worst member of the class?