FactChecking the GOP Responses — Cruz and Paul Lie
Both of these lies lay mostly in Wingnut Mythos - in Rand Paul’s case he calls President Bush and a mostly Republican congress “Liberal Elites” by conflating the politicians who enacted the energy act with today’s politicians rather than those who actually created and passed it while President Bush was in office to sign it.
In Cruz’s case the lie is much more pernicious since it’s based on populist fears designed to scapegoat an entire religion instead of the specific reactionary fundamentalist extremists perpetrating the acts of terror. That’s an act of evil in itself because it feeds fear, hate, and xenophobia. It’s exactly what real Americans should not do, and it is designed to serve base political and geopolitical ends, not our safety.
This sleight of hand where all of Islam is always associated with the extremist terror has it roots with centuries of tribal nationalist causes in Europe, and the populist demagogues there have honed these verbal weapons well.
Two likely presidential candidates — Cruz and Paul — gave more forceful speeches attacking the president’s leadership.
Cruz gave what his aides called an “impromptu video response” to the State of the Union address that was posted on the senator’s Facebook page. It was one of five videotaped GOP responses (six if you count the first aborted attempt by Cruz).
In his video, Cruz criticized Obama’s speech for failing to address terrorism and immigration — except that the president did discuss both.
Cruz claimed “not a word was said about radical Islamic terrorism.” That’s false.
Cruz, Jan. 20: Tonight not a word was said about radical Islamic terrorism. Those words did not come out of the president’s mouth. We cannot win a war on radical Islamic terrorism with a president unwilling to even say the words “radical Islamic terrorism.”
While it is true that Obama did not utter the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” the president did use the phrase “violent extremism” and asked for congressional authority to use force against the Islamic State, a radical Islamic terrorist group that the president referred to in his speech as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Levant).
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