Iowa, the nomination, the election: predictions, predictions

The New Neo Posted on by

Shortly after the debate last night, commenter “The Other Chuck” noted that some evangelicals and conservatives had endorsed Trump in Iowa, and then added:

Should this con artist win Iowa he will be the nominee and probably president.

Sorry, Other Chuck, I don’t mean to pick on you. I don’t even mean to pick on the Original Chuck. I picked your comment because I see so many similar statements all over the blogosphere, and they puzzle me.

Some of them don’t puzzle me at all. Some are from trolls who are pro-Trump and trying to create a steamroller effect of inevitability, engendering gloom in people who support other candidates. The hope is that supporters of other candidates will lose energy, stay home, not work as hard for their guy, and surrender to their fate. Another motive is to cheer on the Trump troops: “Trump, Trump, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, NOBODY CAN!!!”

That’s not The Other Chuck, of course, who’s made it clear he’s not a Trump supporter. He might be part of that second group, the ones who’ve lost heart because they’ve heard so many times about how Trump will win the whole thing is he wins Iowa. Or he might have come to that conclusion on his own—as many people have—for his own logical reasons. There are probably plenty of people of each type, adding to the swelling chorus.

As for me, I call it like I see it. Trump could certainly win Iowa, the nomination, and even the general. But I think the first is most likely, the second somewhat less likely and does not follow from the first, and the third unlikely and follows from neither (although the nomination is, of course, a necessary prerequisite for winning the whole thing; I doubt Trump would win as a third-party candidate, if only because of the way the electoral college works).

Iowa has never been a typical state, nor have its primary results been especially predictive. I think, however, that what Chuck and the others mean is that Trump winning the Iowa primary is exactly what one would not expect, given its Republican population and their belief system. So if he does win, that means his appeal is enormous.

But all polls in all the states where Trump is leading (and which have been polled) say approximately the same thing: 1/3 of the GOP primary voters want him. Basically, the GOP primary voters are voting 1/3 for Trump and 2/3 against Trump.

The important question is which other candidates will drop out and when, and where their votes will go if and when they do. If no one drops out for a long time, or if very few do, and the non-Trumpian 2/3 of the votes continue to be split so very many ways, Trump could win the nomination. Or, it could go to a brokered convention (oh, wouldn’t that be fun). Once people start dropping out, however, their votes will go to someone else, and according to polls where people choose a #2, most of those votes wouldn’t go to Trump.

So unless he starts winning outright, with majorities, it’s still up in the air. Which isn’t to say that Trump can’t win. Of course he can. But it remains to be seen, and I don’t see that Iowa is any sort of special predictor.

That leaves is with the general. As I’ve written many times in many posts, Trump does the worst in head-to-head polls against all the Democrats who might run in the general, and usually the Democrats beat him. In the same polls, Rubio does the best by far against Democrats who might be nominated. And no, Trump does not appeal to black voters or Democrat voters more than the other GOP candidates do; if anything, he appeals less. You may hate those facts, and you may discount them and say they don’t matter, or you may like them, but right now there’s no indication that Trump would win in a general election if he were to be the nominee.

Twitter nation holds an election

The New Neo Posted on by

I never did watch last night’s debate. I got home towards the tail end of it, and I just didn’t have the energy to watch. Instead I read a bunch of comments at different sites, and that’s when it occurred to me—and not for the first time—that we’ve turned into Twitter nation and this election is the Twitter election.

I don’t use Twitter, and rarely read it. But I certainly check it out now and then, when there’s a tweet in the news that catches my eye. Right from the start Twitter held little interest for me, although a lot of bloggers took to it immediately. I suppose tweeting can also be very good to build readership, but I just can’t stomach it and don’t want to spend a moment of precious time doing it.

I’ve not only not been drawn to it, but something about it repels me. I used to think that “something” was just that I prefer lengthier, more fleshed-out thoughts, although I do understand the value of conciseness, and I like a short and witty bon mot as well as the next person, maybe more. Funny quips are great, and often quotable, but too steady a diet of them is like eating nothing but M&Ms.

To me, that’s what Twitter always was—a lot of people being snarky together, trading barbs to see who could be the most clever. Like a bunch of teenagers getting together after school in someone’s basement, having fun at everyone else’s expense.

Yes, some information is imparted now and then through Twitter, but it is usually of the “here’s a great thing I just did!” variety. So Twitter favors snarky one-liner put-downs and/or bragging. Those of you who like Twitter may say I’m selling it short, but every time I go there, that’s what I see and that’s about all I see.

Twitter began in the summer of 2006, and its growth curve went like this:

It had 400,000 tweets posted per quarter in 2007. This grew to 100 million tweets posted per quarter in 2008. In February 2010, Twitter users were sending 50 million tweets per day…As of March 2011, that was about 140 million tweets posted daily…

On March 21, 2012, Twitter celebrated its sixth birthday while also announcing that it has 140 million users and sees 340 million tweets per day…

As of September 2013, the company’s data showed that 200 million users send over 400 million tweets daily, with nearly 60% of tweets sent from mobile devices.

And now, we’ve got about 500 million tweets per day, and counting.

This research bears me out about content in Twitter (although it’s from 2009):

San Antonio-based market-research firm Pear Analytics analyzed 2,000 tweets (originating from the United States and in English) over a two-week period in August 2009 from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm (CST) and separated them into six categories:

Pointless babble ”“ 40%
Conversational ”“ 38%
Pass-along value ”“ 9%
Self-promotion ”“ 6%
Spam ”“ 4%
News ”“ 4%

In this particular election cycle of 2016, Twitter seems to dominate much more than before, and of course it is tailor-made for the strengths of Donald Trump. He has developed snarky one-liner put-downs and bragging to a fine art, and Twitter gives him the perfect platform for that, with a ready-made potential audience of many millions who are drawn to the game. Other candidates also are Twitter users—I’d say that, in this day and age, they must be—but Trump is a natural. I don’t know how many of all the candidates’ tweets are self-generated or if they use specially-trained Twitter assistants (with the candidates having the right of final approval of tweets, of course), but Twitter has been a very active factor in this election, more so than ever before.

Although this post focuses on Twitter, it’s not only Twitter. I’ve noticed over and over—on blogs, on television, in comments, in life—that snark has become the dominant conversational style, the coin of the realm these days. And the phenomenon is only growing.

Nearly everything is irony or mockery, coming from what appears to be a very deep public cynicism, fed in turn by the constant cynicism and mockery. No one is really laudable any more. Elect a narcissistic con man? Why not? They’re all narcissistic con men, so let’s back the conny-ist and most narcissistic con man of all. And let’s laugh about it, and taunt the opposition. Integrity is for suckers, and only saps would believe that anyone smart has it. Except, paradoxically, the snarky, who show the depth of their integrity by the depth of their mocking cynicism.

You might say in response that their cynicism is deserved: we’ve been betrayed by everyone, in government especially, Republicans and Democrats, they’re all lying thieves, yada yada yada. I’m not at all sure it’s that much worse than it used to be. But even if it is, it’s certainly not everyone, and what I see is an incessant, petulant, nit-picky fault-finding on the part of a public that rejects good (or good enough) people in public life for one mistake, one bad judgment, one intemperate remark, and tars them as forever beyond the pale.

The public wants—as I put it a while ago—madder music and stronger wine. Trump gives it to them today, but it needn’t be Trump—next cycle it will be someone else. It’s not about Trump, it’s about what the public has come to be interested in, and what the public demands.

Perhaps we will get the government we deserve. I certainly hope not. I hope we get a government much better than we deserve. But that’s not often the way it works, is it?

[NOTE: I tried to make that last paragraph come in under 140 characters (spaces apparently count as characters on Twitter, which has a nice symbolism to it), so it could qualify as tweet-length. Couldn’t quite do it without making it sound more stupid, so in the end I just let it be.]

Open thread: tonight’s debate[s]

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m going out in a little while for a social engagement (yes, every now and then I leave my computer) and I don’t plan to be back until fairly late tonight.

So I will miss blogging the debate in real time. I plan to watch it later—probably—or maybe just highlights. I’m particularly curious about tonight’s debate because of the changed dynamics resulting from the absence of He Who Shall Not Be Named.

Here’s a thread for you all to discuss it. Enjoy!

When Trump supported amnesty

The New Neo Posted on by

It was not so long ago, either. About the time that Rubio was in the Gang of Eight:

To make its point, the ad pulls from sources that range from 1990 to July 2015. The older sources go to the use of immigrant labor in building Trump’s hotels, although there is more on that from last year, too. The sources on Trump’s positions on “amnesty” come from 2013 and June of last year, both close enough to present day to potentially raise questions about Trump’s credibility on the one topic that has raised him to front-runner status.

The tweet in 2013 came at the same time that Marco Rubio put together the Gang of 8 deal on immigration in the Senate, for which voters and other Republican candidates have punished him ever since. Trump’s 2013 tweet basically summarizes the Gang of 8 approach ”” secure the borders, then legalize most of the remaining illegal immigrants after background checks and fines, which some consider “amnesty.” The June 2015 statement appears to go a little farther in providing a “path,” presumably to citizenship, and Trump made that statement in the context of the presidential campaign. The difference might be that Trump wants a “touchback” first ”” deportation followed by immediate readmission ”” but that would be almost impossible to accomplish, and in the end no different in substance than the Gang of 8 deal which GOP voters mainly opposed.

I have little doubt that Trump will either say he is being misrepresented in this ad, or has changed his mind. And I have little doubt that most of his supporters would find that A-okay. But I’ve long wondered—long before I ever saw this ad, which is made by the same PAC, Our Principles, that made this recent ad—why Trump is forgiven for words and revisions that other candidates aren’t forgiven for. Many of his supporters say it’s because he’s strong on immigration, and that’s the most important thing, but I’ve also long noticed that he’s not been consistent on immigration and that, even if you only consider his words since he entered the campaign, they sound much tougher than they are.

Iran: now the business deals begin

The New Neo Posted on by

The nuclear deal wasn’t the only deal, of course. It was a prelude to this sort of thing: France and Iran are trying to make a financial deal, now that sanctions are no more. Will it work?:

Exactly what stage the Airbus deal was at remained unclear on Thursday, however, amid scepticism over how far and how fast western firms can get into Iran.

French officials said Iran was putting the finishing touches to the Airbus deal, and Iran earlier this week gave estimates of up to 127 Airbus planes, but Iranian Transport Minister Abbas Akhoundi declined to give further details and sources close to the discussions said technical talks were continuing.

Banks also remain wary so soon after the lifting of sanctions, senior French bankers have said…

Among other deals flagged on Thursday were one involving French national railway operator SNCF and another for aluminum company Fives.

For Peugeot, the Iranian factory tie up is critical. When it suspended sales in Iran in 2012 it lost nearly 10 percent of global deliveries and interrupted a relationship with the country that dates back more than 50 years.

Europe’s chomping at the bit, warily. Can you chomp warily?

Trump’s skeletons are outside the closet

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I hate writing so much about Trump. Positively hate it. But the more I read about him, the more disturbed I become, and I feel like if no one else is telling a particular story, I need to do it.]

Commenter “Wooly Bully” said that “Trump has a very large closet that holds many skeletons.”

I don’t know about Trump’s closet; the phrase usually refers to something heretofore hidden.

The thing that strikes me about Trump is that a great deal of his bad behavior is out in the open, fully accessible. And his behavior had been very bad. I don’t mean things like infidelities, although that’s certainly part of his past. I mean things that are directly relevant to his ability to govern.

The material is fully accessible, as I said—I’ve encountered quite a bit of it, and probably only the tip of the iceberg, because prior to this campaign I’ve never had the slightest interest in Trump’s biography. But it’s right there in public, in terms of articles and books. However, it’s not common knowledge to most people.

For example, there’s the story of what Trump did in Scotland. I’ve written one post about it and plan others, but the story is (or should be) HUGE, as Trump might say. To summarize: it involves Trump making promises to Scotland that he didn’t keep (about the amount of his investment and the number of jobs that would be created; both were far far less than promised); he lied about how much he had invested when the truth was easily obtainable; he insulted and threatened anyone who crossed him, including the farmers and other people of modest means whose land was near the golf course he was building and who refused to sell to him; he tried to use the law to compel them to sell to him even though he didn’t need their land to actually build the course; and then he engaged in a war of insults with those he’d lied to. He squandered the goodwill of the people of Aberdeen who had originally supported the project—a luxury golf course and hotel—because of the money they thought it would bring to the stricken area. (I have many many links for all of this, but will include them when I write a longer, more detailed, article; some of the links are in my previous post on the subject.)

I’m probably leaving something off the list, but you get the idea.

This information is all in the public domain, and so far his opposition isn’t using it. Perhaps his GOP opponents haven’t used it so far because they thought he’d fade on his own. Or each one of them didn’t want to become his special target. Or they thought they could attack him on his politics. That hasn’t seemed to work so far. But it seems to me that, if a guy is making a lot of promises to you, and telling you what a great negotiator and dealmaker he is, and that’s why you should elect him—he’s a doer who does great things—you’d do well to look at some of his deals that went bad, his behavior during them, and the consequences. If he’s a liar, he might just be lying to you.

One thing I think we can safely say is that the Democrats will use this stuff against Trump if he is the nominee. It makes him look terrible: liar, con man, rich elitist bullying the little guy.

The Trump way: “phony” Vander Plaats

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, I wouldn’t think this was the way to ingratiate yourself with Iowan evangelicals—or most people, actually.

But maybe I’m just behind the times.

I hadn’t heard about this until now [hat tip: commenter “Jim“], or I probably would have incorporated the story into this post from earlier today. At any rate, it’s relevant to the topic of Trump’s treatment of people who don’t do as he would like them to, as I think you’ll see when you read it—and I suggest you read the whole thing, because the excerpt really doesn’t convey the flavor of what happened:

Donald Trump took to Twitter Tuesday to attack one of rival Ted Cruz’s more influential Iowa endorsers, Christian conservative leader Bob Vander Plaats.

“This plays to Trump’s judgment and temperament,” Vander Plaats told The Des Moines Register in response. “He will burn anybody.”

Trump, a Republican presidential candidate, unleashed multiple tweets critical of Vander Plaats, calling the CEO of the Family Leader “phony” and a “bad guy.”

“Why doesn’t phony @bobvanderplaats tell his followers all the times he asked for him and his family to stay at my hotels-didn’t like paying,” Trump tweeted Tuesday morning.

…Early on when Trump was considering running for president in 2016, he courted Vander Plaats…

“He invited my wife, Darla, and me to come to New York and he made sure we stayed with him, and he’d be offended if we stayed with anyone but him. And he refused payment,” Vander Plaats said…

Okay, that’s the background. This is the far more important part, in my opinion:

On Twitter, Trump followed up by tweeting Vander Plaats “begged me to do an event while asking organizers for $100,000 for himself ”” a bad guy!”

Vander Plaats replied “@realDonaldTrump you know that’s not true. I gave you an introduction and opportunity and you charged the guy $100K. May work in NY not IA.”

The back story there, Vander Plaats told the Register, is that in late 2014, he suggested that a good way for Trump to meet Iowans would be to come to the annual real estate conference hosted by Steve Bruere of Peoples Company.

…Trump charged Bruere money for his presence at the 2015 conference, even though Vander Plaats said he warned Trump that “he should not be charging to come into Iowa. That is not a good impression.”

Peoples Co. officials confirmed to the Register that the company paid Trump $100,000.

Vander Plaats said he was paid nothing for introducing Trump to Bruere, and no donation was made to the Family Leader….

“He’s trying to discredit my endorsement. I’m sure he’s not happy,” Vander Plaats said. “I was warned about this by plenty of others ”” if you don’t endorse him, watch out.”

And I think that Trump is well aware that others reading this story—people he would like to fall in line with him—will get the message, loud and clear, about the costs of disobeying.

As I said, read the whole thing. This really hasn’t been covered all that much, although it obviously is making the Iowa papers.

It certainly appears as though Trump is lying in this case about the fee; here’s the evidence. If so, this fits in perfectly with what I’ve already observed of Trump’s behavior, particularly what I learned from the Aberdeen story: if you cross him, he will attack you, and truth is no obstacle for him.

The latest scary virus: Zika

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not really new; the virus and the disease it causes, Zika fever, was identified back in the 1950s in Africa. But it has been spreading for a while, and recently made the leap to the Western Hemisphere and is causing trouble in Brazil, according to scientists:

Zika virus is transmitted by daytime-active mosquitoes and has been isolated from a number of species in the genus Aedes…

Before the current pandemic, which began in 2007, Zika virus “rarely caused recognized ‘spillover’ infections in humans, even in highly enzootic areas”…

In 2015 Zika virus RNA was detected in the amniotic fluid of two fetuses, indicating that it had crossed the placenta and could cause a mother-to-child infection. On 20 January 2016, scientists from the state of Parané¡, Brazil, detected genetic material of Zika virus in the placenta of a woman who had undergone an abortion due to the fetus’s microcephaly, which confirmed that the virus is able to pass the placenta.

For most people, a bout of Zika fever is a mild event with no lasting consequences. The fear that’s now spreading is that some scientists believe that Zika is connected to a dramatic spike in microcephalic births in an area of Brazil where the virus has become common:

In Brazil, as thousands became infected with Zika, the rate of microcephaly increased exponentially. In 2013 and 2014, the country documented 167 and 147 cases of microcephaly respectively. But by 2015 as Zika spread, Brazilian officials registered 2,782 cases before the end of the year, according to the New York Times. That’s a 1,792% increase year on year. Virologists who studied Zika in Brazil said they have “a lot of indirect evidence” that connects the virus to microcephaly.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said there is no direct link yet between the virus and the birth defect. Nevertheless, the CDC warned pregnant women to avoid travel to countries where Zika is present, and unofficially some Brazilian health authorities have warned women against getting pregnant.

So although it has not been proven, there is a statistical and geographic link. The mosquito is not yet in most of the US, but at present is estimated or projected (it’s really unclear what this means) to include areas of the southeastern part of the country and along the coast about as far north as New York:

zikamostquito

A vaccine is many years away.

I have no idea whether this will end up being a big deal or not. It’s certainly a big deal when a family has a microcephalic child, and although the link is not proven, those figures are certainly indicative of a strong possibility.

I’ve read a lot of articles about this, and I’ve not seen one that mentions DDT as a way to combat it. And yet it seemed to me it could be a good stopgap measure. However, when I checked about the mosquito in question, it seems that some strains are resistant to DDT.

[NOTE: I’ve written previously about DDT in connection with malaria.]

The art of the insult, and power: “Why can’t Trump handle Megyn Kelly?”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is the wrong question to be asking, I think.

But Ashe Schow was asking it (or at least, whoever wrote the headline was asking it), shortly before the news that Trump had decided to go through with his threat to boycott the debate on Thursday:

Republican front-runner and businessman Donald Trump is now threatening to boycott the upcoming GOP debate if host Fox News doesn’t remove Megyn Kelly as a moderator….

…his ongoing comments and actions toward Kelly are troubling.

How will Trump handle a hostile press if he is president?…[W]ill he just shut them out?…

As I wrote yesterday, I think Trump’s move makes him look weak, but I am well aware that his supporters think it makes him look strong. I wonder how many of the former there are and how many of the latter—and whether, even if more numerous, the votes of the former will remain split in the primaries among the many candidates.

However, those are separate issues. The question here is how Trump would handle a hostile press if president.

The answer to Schow’s question is actually rather obvious, I think. Although there are a lot of unknowns about what Trump would do (and/or be able to do) as president, as well as how he would go about trying—on the issue of Trump’s handling of adversity and criticism there is an embarrassment of riches in terms of evidence from the past. And unless Trump had some sort of personality transplant after an election, we could predict his reaction based on past experience, which is that he would insult whoever criticizes him, and he would do it without shame or apology, and he would do it in the most personal terms he believed he could get away with. And he knows from past experience that he can get away with a great deal of it, so the more pointed, personal, and below-the-belt the better.

Even as president, I don’t see him as dependent on the press. He would go directly to the people—via Twitter or other social platforms—and he would ridicule and/or try to hurt the reputation and career of anyone whose comments about him he didn’t like. I don’t see this as any sort of mystery. Obama has done something like this, but Trump would make Obama look like Emily Post.

I don’t see it as strength, but it is about power (they are not synonymous), and certainly it is for Trump. And Trump—who is almost entirely about power (money and success just being a way to get it)—plays the game Trump’s way:

For many years I’ve said that if someone screws you, screw them back. When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can.”

There is a decades-long history of Trump acting out this credo. I’m not going to waste a lot of time listing the number of people he’s insulted and the ways in which he’s done it. It’s all out there. There’s a certain repetitiousness to it: his favorite words, historically speaking (for both men and women, by the way), have been “dummy,” “moron,” and “loser.”

But sometimes he’s a lot more creative, as with this charmer about Ariana Huffington:

Ariana Huffington is unattractive both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man- he made a good decision.

Trump doesn’t just shoot from the hip, either. He has purposefully adopted the insult as a way to intimidate people who question or criticize him, and he knows it unnerves them. He counts on their own more polite values to protect him from their returning the insult in kind, but he is also confident that they will never win that game against him, because he will hit them back twice as hard, and his insults have no bottom—he will go as low as he needs to.

This: “When somebody hurts you, just go after them as viciously and as violently as you can” is a clue to which we need to pay attention, and not just in terms of insults. So far in his life, Trump has had power, but it’s been the power of the purse and of celebrity in addition to his brash mouth. If he were to become president, though—now, that would be power. He would not hesitate to use it—to insult anyone he wishes, or to shut out the press if he deems that best in a particular circumstance, or to otherwise destroy anyone who gets in his way. I don’t know what limits he would place on that; whether it would be agencies like the NSA or the IRS he would use against enemies, or whether it would be more. I’ve not heard much from him about protecting liberty or the importance of the rule of law, with the exception of Second Amendment rights. If his attitude towards Kelo is any indication, he’s all for using the government to muscle people into doing what he wants.

And if you think he’ll only use his power to do what you’d like him to do, so that makes it okay, then I think you’re very dangerously naive.

Thursday’s debate: Trump takes his marbles and goes home

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump says he will not participate in the Fox debate on Thursday, because Fox issued a statement he didn’t like in response to his demand that they remove Megyn Kelly as one of the questioners:

Trump has made such threats before, but he said that the Fox News Channel, which is hosting the debate Thursday night, had gone too far by issuing press statements on Tuesday that he said mocked his concern about Megyn Kelly, one of the debate co-moderators.

“They’re dealing with someone who’s a little bit different. They can’t toy with me like they toy with everybody else,” he added.

When Trump saw the press release from Fox, “I said, ‘Bye bye,'” he said…

Earlier Tuesday, Fox News Channel President Roger Ailes told The Post that “Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist, and the entire network stands behind her. She will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night.”

Later, the network poked fun at Trump in a satirical statement: “We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president. A nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.”

My first reaction is: he can dish it out, but he can’t take it.

He can insult their journalist (which he has done time and again), he can demand they remove her and issue ultimatums, he can make sarcastic and insulting tweets about everything and everybody, but he can’t take one?

My second reaction is: if you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Oh, I realize that many people will see it differently and think this is a strong move denoting power on Trump’s part. I don’t think it will hurt him much with those who already support him. He must be feeling very confident about that. But to those who are on the fence, wavering, mulling it over (and there are still many undecided primary voters, even in Iowa and New Hampshire), I think it looks weak. It looks especially weak for a man whose great appeal to his supporters is based to a significant extent on his ability to withstand the back-and-forth of politics and trade insults with the best (or worst) of them.

But who knows. Maybe his numbers will soar. If so, that will say more about Americans than about Trump.

[NOTE: I think Fox’s ratings for the debate may go down a bit. But maybe not, because now people may tune in to see the novelty of how a debate shapes up without the Trump factor.]

[ADDENDUM: By the way, I don’t think Fox should have issued that jokey taunt. But Trump has already undermined the dignity of the entire endeavor by his attacks on Kelly and the form they took. At any rate, my post isn’t about who’s right or wrong, it’s about Trump acting weak here. It seems odd to me that a man who is known for his insults, and his supposed toughness, can’t take a response in kind and instead wants to leave the fray.

I’m surprised he didn’t just answer them with some sort of witty put-down. He’s certainly capable of that. And then he could have put them down during the debate if he didn’t like what happened there. Leaving makes him look cowardly.]

[ADDENDUM II: I think that Fox should hold the debate with an empty podium right in the middle—you know, like the empty chair.]

2011: Ted Cruz on the wall (and amnesty)

The New Neo Posted on by

Those who say that everyone else is just following Trump when they talk about a wall and a secure border, should take a look at this from 2011. And notice, also what he said about amnesty.

Oh, I know it won’t matter to the most fervent Trump supporters. “Well, that not a wall like Trump will build a wall!” There will always be something to object to. But Cruz has been fighting for this—actions, not just words—for a long time, as long as he’s been in public office (that 2011 interview was during his campaign for the Senate).

In the video, Cruz actually supports more than a wall; he was being inclusive and expansive about all the solutions to the main problem, which is to secure the border. I wrote a piece about the logistical, geographic, and legal problems here; take a look and you’ll see what I’m referring to.

Over two years ago, the El Paso Times wrote this about Cruz and the border (I copied the text a while back, but unfortunately the link is now dead and I can’t find another) [emphasis mine]:

A border congressman last week said that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s demands for “100 percent operational” control of the border are expensive and unrealistic”¦

…[I]n a June speech to the Senate, Cruz said he would not support any reform bill until the United States established “100 percent operational control” of its border with Mexico.

A few weeks earlier, he voted to block debate of an immigration bill hashed out by the bipartisan “Gang of Eight.”

“The insecurity of our borders is causing human tragedies in our country, many, many of which are occurring in my home state of Texas,” Cruz told the Senate on June 22. “Central to any debate over immigration is the need to secure our borders.”

Cruz later added, “Right now, our borders are anything but secure.”

Cruz proposed to secure the border by tripling the size of the border patrol and quadrupling the number of helicopters and cameras on the border and completing a double-layered border fence.

That was in the fall of 2013.