It would not be surprising if no-one actually read every word spouted by the newest Senator from Texas for almost twenty-one hours on the floor of the U.S. Senate. I have made a start, but it is a tedious business and I have to keep stopping to keep from being made (only a German word comes to mind) irre -- i.e."led astray."
Irrational ramblings, one suspects, are designed to do that. They serve to distract and delay. Employed by a predator, they effectively ensnare the prey to be consumed later. Carried out verbally, they serve the same purpose. Imagine the wolf expounding on the sharpness of his teeth to Little Red Riding Hood.
I've selected a few sample paragraphs, all of which presumably occurred in the early hours of Cruz's verbal marathon, before most of the country had gone to sleep and while the Senator was still fresh.
On Friday or Saturday of this week we will vote on cloture. Anyone who votes yes for cloture, anyone who votes to cut off debate on this bill, is voting to allow Senate majority leader Harry Reid to fully fund ObamaCare. That is a vote that I think is a profound mistake.
That is a statement which is, at least, germain to the issue. However, in retrospect, since Senator Cruz voted for that measure, it reveals him as a person who makes intentional mistakes. Either that, or an admission that his description of the measure as allowing "Senate majority leader Harry Reid to fully fund ObamaCare" was a lie, which it was and, as he repeats it, continues to be.
If, on the other hand, you or any other American citizen went to a U.S. Senator--went to Senator Vitter--and said: Senator Vitter, if you don't vote the way I want, I am going to take thousands of dollars out of your personal bank account, I am going to extract them forcibly from your personal bank account, well, as I told the law professor, then you would be guilty of extortion and would be charged and no doubt criminally convicted because under the black letter definition, that conduct--threatening to pay someone individually thousands of dollars or take thousands of dollars away from them as a direct quid pro quo for how a Member of Congress votes--constitutes either bribery or extortion.
That paragraph isn't just random rambling, either. Although the characteristic (of the instinct-driven person) shift in perspective from first person to the second and the third is disconcerting, that bribery and/or extortion are being perpetrated by Congress is accurate. Whether they get away with it because of Congressional immunity, as the next paragraph claims, is probably debatable. However, since he's got the impetus reversed, it all sounds non-sensical anyway, which is the point.
When we look at the unemployment rate of African-American teens of 38.2 percent, the fast food industry has been such a great avenue for advancement for minority teenagers.
Now, here's a statement that is apparently non-sensical
and pointless. While the audience is supposed to positively recollect stories of his immigrant father working his way up the social ladder from washing dishes to preacher, his subconscious seems to have balked at a lie too far and the sentence comes out garbled. The recognition that an unemployment rate of 38.2 percent is "great ... for advancement" is on a par with Barbara Bush's observation that being stuck in the Super Dome was an improvement for the "disadvantaged" victims of Hurricane Katrina.
In May 2013 Moody's economist Mark Zandi noted a slowdown in small business hiring due to ObamaCare.
OK, it is quite possible that an economist does not understand what comes first and what comes second. Economics seems to be particularly attractive to people whose sense of time and sequence is either poor or missing. Also, the use of "due" to imply an obligation that is still to be satisfied in the future, as well as an historical cause and effect connection is confusing to many people. However, as a member of Congress, Cruz should be clear about the fact that the affordable care part of the legislation passed by Congress had not gone into effect at the time he was speaking. So, it is simply not possible for the legislation to be the cause of hiring practices in totally unrelated private enterprises.
I will grant that some people live in an ineffable present in which all events and occurances are simultaneous. Indeed, there's a whole tribe in the Amazon where every member has no sense of time or sequence, no awareness of history and no words for numbers. However, Western civilization, like other great civilizations before it, including the Aztec in Mesoamerica, perceives time as a linear sequence in which events follow each other. Elevating people who can't perceive that accurately into positions of influence is probably a bad idea, regardless of how verbally gifted they are.
I had a choice with which I was confronted, which was do I follow through and wear my argument boots or do I listen to the very sage counsel from my friend from Kentucky and go with more comfortable shoes. I will embarrassingly admit that I took the coward's way out. I went and purchased some black tennis shoes. Actually, I think they are the same model the senior Senator from Utah Orrin Hatch wears on a regular basis. I am not in my argument boots, and I will confess I do feel pretty embarrassed by that. I am pretty sure, since we are on the Senate floor and C-SPAN is covering it, that this may not be covered by the priest-penitent privilege, but I do feel it is a question of sorts.
Admitting to un-important errors seems to be characteristic of the instinct-driven, as is their apparent confusion about the nature of choice. Choice is not a confrontation. It's the natural response to multiple options. Of course, if one doesn't see multiples of anything, then either/or, the binary mode, is inevitable.
What the Senator ought to be embarrassed about is pandering to his seniors by referencing their advice and habits of footwear and besmirching the Congressional Record with such trivialities. And, surely, he's familiar with the Congressional Record, since it's the legislative history found there which his constitutional lawyer friends routinely resort to whenever they bring another law suit against the federal government.
But, perhaps he's "salting the mine" and this nonsense about sneakers and "argument boots" made of ostrich leather is designed to distract us.
Finally, I have to add that as an immigrant child myself, I take umbrage at the scam being perpetrated by the "immigrant story" of hard work and deprivation and self-improvement. For a Cuban with a hundred dollars sewed in his underwear to gain entry to college, he had to have a hand up. Fifty cents an hour plus all the free food he could eat for washing dishes was not a hardship when college instructors were earning a mere three thousand a year.
The immigrant story is a scam. It's one I heard most of my life from my mother. Generous Americans doing more for others than was done for them are discounted and taken advantage of. If Cruz Junior wants to be embarrassed, let him be embarrassed about opportunistic twice-divorced Cruz Senior, who presumes to preach virtue to people from whom he extorts a living. And, being embarrassed, let him shut his mouth.