Michael A. Cohen had an article in the Boston Globe yesterday entitled A Ted Cruz loss would help GOP recover. The thesis of the article was that if Cruz were actually to be the Presidential nominee he would get slaughtered in the general election, and that might finally right the ship over at the Republican party (which has been listing further and further rightward for years, threatening to sink the whole enterprise).

I don’t know.

It seems to me that there is no end in sight relative to the rightward list of the Republican party, and yet they’ve still been successful in congress. Until Bill Clinton and Barack Obama they had been remarkably successful in the Presidential elections as well.

I mean, consider that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has been turning the Kansas economy into a smoking ruin by essentially running a Teaparty experiment in governing through tax cuts. And still, the good folks of Kansas returned this ideologue to office last November.

People’s ability to vote against their own interests seems to know no bounds. Especially conservative Republicans voting against their own interests.

So now we have Ted Cruz, who some of you know wasn’t even born in the United States. Canada claims that honor. But Cruz’ mother was an American, which qualifies him as a natural born citizen. Cruz’ father was born in Cuba, although he became naturalized in 2005.

Cruz is no moron: he graduated cum laude from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1992. While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society’s Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.  Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship.

And yet, shortly after announcing, Cruz claimed that we’re in a period of global cooling based on a 1975 Newsweek article. In an interview with the Texas Tribune  argued that the 1975 global cooling story in Newsweek is evidence that “alarmists” simply want the government to control the energy sector. Cruz was quoted as saying:

I read this morning a Newsweek article from the 1970s talking about global cooling. And it said the science is clear, it is overwhelming, we are in a major cooling period and it’s going to cause enormous problems worldwide. … Now, the data proved to be not backing up that theory. So then all the advocates of global cooling suddenly shifted to global warming.

The article in question was a single-page story published on April 28, 1975 by journalist Peter Gwynne. Indeed, it warned about a period of global cooling, with particular concern regarding reductions in crop yields that might be attributable to cooler temperatures. However, published almost 40 years ago, the article has been disowned by its own author.

Hypocrisy is now the essence of the Republican playbook.
Hypocrisy is now the essence of the Republican playbook.
Hypocrisy is now the essence of the Republican playbook.

Repeat it after me, and say it again and again. As the Presidential campaign starts to wind up over the next two years, we’ll be repeating this theme again and again, because there are so many examples to choose from.

But, propaganda only works until its exposed. As none other than Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Propaganda becomes ineffective the moment we are aware of it.” It’s time to start making people aware of it.