Ted Cruz?

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Ted Cruz?

From the news desk of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas, this is Ray Mossholder and this is Campaign 2016: Is Ted Cruz a liar?

Its as if we were on a playground. That’s where you hear things like “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” or “How do you know when that kid’s lying? His lips are moving!” And in the Republican debates and in this year’s Democrat debates, these are statements that were very close to being used by each of the candidates. In a real sense they have said them with different words.

Because of his outspoken lack of political correctness, of all the candidates it’s Donald Trump, whether he becomes our president or not, who will be most remembered for his verbal attacks on Ted Cruz. When an adult calls someone else a liar in front of millions of people, (like the many millions watching the Republican debates over television), it is shocking and reminds me of that playground.

But what if it’s true? What if the one being accused IS lying? Shouldn’t America’s voters know that? We the people will soon be voting in primaries, if we haven’t already, and then in the general election. If a candidate has a regular pattern of lying, wouldn’t it be important for you to know that? Does honesty matter to you, most especially in a president?

At this point I can hear someone say, “Politicians  are crooks who are in politics for the money they can make. They all lie.” And I would respond “Some lie far more than others.”

Whoever is our next president will be in many ways in control of your life and mine, making decisions that can strengthen us or destroy us as Americans, strengthen or destroy the next generation, including your children. Should you, in all wisdom, vote for a habitual liar who can never be trusted? – A person promising what they never plan to deliver? What if he or she were president and whenever they spoke to the American people they put their own slant on whatever they said and wouldn’t even blink if what theywere telling us wasn’t even a smidgen true?

So, in keeping with keeping with my promise on Campaign 2016 that I will try to tell the truth about each of the candidates – Republican or Democrat – as far as I can find the truth – this time we are going to settle the question “Are Donald Trump and Marco Rubio telling the truth when they say that Ted Cruz is a liar, totally dishonest – one who covers up his tracks to make himself look good?”

Let it be understood from the outset that I admire the positive things that Ted Cruz has done. At Harvard, Cruz amazed his college and America by winning the national college debate championship individually and then won ithe championship again again with his debate partner. Ted Cruz went beyond that and was in the finals for the world college debate championship. He thinks quickly on his feet and is extremely intelligent. As Attorney General in my state of Texas, he was loved by most and it set him in motion to win his Congressional Senate seat. He makes it very clear that he is a conservative and a Christian. All these things make me heavily lean towards Ted Cruz for president. But just before we vote him into the highest office in the land, and arguably the most important office in the world, let’s look at the nagging question “Is Ted Cruz a liar?”

William Saletan at the website Slate says about Ted Cruz “He’s a lawyer, not a leader.” As a conservative, Cruz has argued brilliantly against amnesty, Obamacare, and Planned Parenthood, in fact, he has argued in front of the United States Supreme Court on several occasions on subjects dear to the hearts of conservatives.

Ted Cruz said during the Republican debate in Las Vegas, “The battle over amnesty was a time for choosing”. He said that he and Senator Jeff sessions of Alabama stood strongly to secure the border and keep illegal aliens out. Cruz then attacked Marco Rubio who joined Chuck Schumer and other Democrats to push “a total amnesty plan”. Cruz said “I have never supported the legalization of aliens. In fact, I led the fight against Rubio’s legislation and amnesty intentions.” Is THAT true?

What Saleten has done is to study almost every word Ted Cruz spoke during the immigration showdown in the Senate. It’s a timeline that goes between Cruz being sworn in as a freshman Senator in January 2013 and the end of June 2013 when the Senate bill he favored, passed.

You have undoubtedly heard the term “The Gang of Eight”. That was the name given to four Democrats and four Republicans, including Republican Marco Rubio who pushed hard to pass an immigration reform proposal that included a definite path to citizenship. While that was happening, Ted Cruz said that he had “deep concerns” about it and said a path to citizenship would alienate many Republicans. Yet when he was directly asked by news reporters “Would you vote against anything that has a path to citizenship included?” Cruz wouldn’t answer.

Even with that being true, Ted Cruz has been consistent throughout his first term as a senator in saying that he favored tighter borders, stronger enforcement at the borders, and an easier process for legal entry into the United States through H-1B visas (more about that later). Cruz was holding these views during a time when polls showed 60% of Americans endorsed a pathway to citizenship for the illegal aliens whenever a question about that had been asked in a certain way. So, he wasn’t saying any of this to win friends and influence people. He hung tough.

But now let’s flip this coin over. We all know that Ted Cruz’s campaign staff, during the pre-vote week in Iowa that preceded that state’s caucus, sent out robocalls to Iowa’s voters spreading the totally false and destructive information that Doctor Ben Carson was suspending his candidacy. Then the call urged each voter to vote for Cruz instead of wasting their vote on the now non-candidate Carson. When confronted afterward, Senator Cruz excused himself by saying that he had no part in this and that he knew nothing about it while it was being done. The problem is, presidential candidate Ted Cruz should have laid out clear and inflexible rules right from the beginning with his whole staff that in part stated only total honesty would be accepted by him and any dishonesty would result in an immediate firing. No staff member, no matter how high up the ladder, should have been allowed to move ahead on anything that serious without the direct permission of each candidate. Wouldn’t you want your president to be the one to make final decisions that would seriously affect both you and your family?. Doctor Carson was maligned and has said so ever since. There is the probability that that lie cost Ben Carson a large amont of votes, votes that, in such an evangelical state like Iowa, instead most probably went in large number to Cruz. No one will ever know how many votes Dr. Carson lost through that lie or what it may have cost him.

According to Donald Trump, Cruz kept up his lies about him with robocalls throughout South Carolina and did it again in Nevada. Ted Cruz denies it. 

During this past week in Nevada, Ted Cruz’s campaign staff was at it again. This time they ran an ad on that states televison showing a photo–shopped picture , supposedly showing Marco Rubio with a large and admiring smile on his face while Barack Obama is smiling back with an “You’re an idiot” grin on his face. In reacting to that supposed photo, Marco Rubio said to reporters “The picture’s a fake, and that alone should prove to you everything I’ve been saying for the last few days – Ted Cruz keeps making things up. I think it’s a disturbing pattern, guys, every day the Cruz team team is spreading lies. In this case they literally lied with a picture.”

Rubio’s top strategist added “There is a culture of dishonesty from top to bottom in Cruz’s presidential campaign. It’s reflected in what Ted Cruz himself says. It’s reflected by the phony, fake, Facebook pages that his supporters put up. It’s reflected by calls to Iowa voters saying Ben Carson had dropped out.

After four state’s were full victims of the Ted Cruz campaign, Cruz finally fired his publicity manager this week. Now it will be easy to watch Cruz’s campaign tactics from here on out. If all of the phoniness ends, it will mean that either it was the publicity manager doing all the false claims, or that Ted Cruz has stopped his own dirty tactics. Like never knowing how many votes Doctor Carson lost because of Ted’s team did, we’ll never know whether Ted Cruz or his campaign staff was guilty of lying. That Ted Cruz didn’t fire his publicity director while they were still in Iowa instead of allowing him to continue spreading lies about Cruz’s rival candidates through three more campaign states, at very least shows a great weakness in his leadership.

With all of that said, there is one other fact that does stick out like a sore thumb. It’s in regards to how Ted Cruz financed his campaign for the United States Senate four years ago. Heidi Cruz, Ted’s beautiful wife, is his biggest supporter in many ways. Ted says he went to Heidi before he was sure he could afford to run for the Senate and said to her “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, our liquid worth, and put it into the campaign.” That amounted to $960,000. Heidi said “Of course.”

Two months later, shortly before the scheduled runoff election, the couple had to add still more money, bringing the total to 1.2 million dollars, which Cruz says “is all we had saved”. However the one thing that Ted neglected to mention was that Heidi works at Goldman Sachs and that’s where they made a $1 million low interest loan that eventually helped complete his road to his Senate seat. That fact was not disclosed by Ted Cruz on his campaign finance report, which is an absolute legal no no. When the New York Times broke the story on this, Ted Cruz said “Woops!” He called it simply an oversight.

Here is what the critics of Ted Cruz are saying about that loan. Goldman Sachs is a company that employs hundreds of workers who are on H–1B visas. As I’ve already mentioned, one of the things that Ted Cruz continues to advocate is a huge increase in H–1B visas. Donald Trump is reminding everyone that it was Ted Cruz who accused him of having “New York values.” When a Washington Post writer reflected on that, they wrote “If hiding a big loan from a Wall Street firm tied to the housing crisis isn’t the essence of ‘New York values’ I am not sure what is.”

Throughout his campaign, Ted Cruz continues to say that Wall Street bailouts and the influence of big banks in Washington must be stopped. And yet it is to one of those banks – Goldman Sachs – to which he owes so much.

Again, Ted Cruz has been the Attorney General of the state of Texas. No one but a tremendously gifted lawyer could ever have such a role. When it was discovered that Cruz hadn’t disclosed his loan, he told the New York Times it was only “an oversight”. The New York Times said of that excuse “Saying it was an oversight after he won his seat is hardly an excuse. It’s evidence that Cruz was hiding the ball all the time it mattered during the election.” 

During the November Fox Business Republican debate, Neil Cavuto asked Cruz if he was in favor of bailing out banks. Cruz’s answer was “The truth is, the rich do great with the government. They get in bed with big government. The big banks grow bigger and bigger and bigger under Dodd–Frank, and community banks are going out of business. And by the way, the consequence of that is small businesses can’t get business loans, and it is that fundamental corruption that is why six of the ten wealthiest counties in America are in and around Washington DC.”

Neil Cavuto then asked Cruz “I just want to be clear, if you don’t mind, that millions of depositors would be on the line with that decision. And I just want to be clear. If it were to happen again, for whatever reason, you would let it go, you would let a Bank of America go?”

Ted Cruz answered “So let me be clear, I would not bail them out, but instead of adjusting monetary policy according to whims and getting it wrong over and over again and causing booms and busts, what the Fed should be doing is, number one, keeping our money tied to a stable level of gold. And number two, serving as a lender of last resort.”

The Washington Post said of that remark “That’s the essence of cronyism – Cruz gets his money when he is in a pinch, but ordinary employees, customers and shareholders will get no help from him.”

The Times report continued by saying “In the first half of 2012, Ted and Heidi Cruz obtained the low–interest loan from Goldman Sachs, as well as another one from Citibank. The loans totaled as much as $750,000 and eventually increased to a maximum of $1 million before partly being paid down later that year. Citibank was another Wall Street firm tied up in the housing disaster.

The Washington Post said about all these things “This all feeds into Trump’s argument that he himself is not beholden to anyone, unlike greedy politicians. He is financing his own campaign.” Jennifer Rubin who writes The Right Turn blog for the Washington Post said “The GOP is lucky to find this out now. Imagine what would happen if the party nominated someone with this to go up against the Clinton attack machine. It’s one more reason not to nominate someone with such a thin public record who has never been thoroughly vetted.”

This is Ray Mossholder. With all that I’ve shared in this article and on the one about Marco Rubio that is on Reach More Now YouTube and reachmorenow.com, I in no way mean for any of this to be a personal attack on anyone. I like each candidate still running. But if you are going to vote in the primary, or the 2016 election, please learn all you can about the one you plan to vote for and about the other candidates as well. The next post in this series of Campaign 2016 will turn the spotlight on Donald Trump with the question “What Hasn’t Donald Trump Told Us?”

Ted Cruz?

Ted Cruz?