Human Events
By: John Hayward
9/30/2013 09:40 AM


Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend, where he was subjected to the sort of confrontational needling by host David Gregory that no Democrat will ever have to face on anything. Good thing, too, because if “journalists” ever treated someone like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or President Barack Obama the way Gregory attacked Cruz, they’d have a nervous breakdown.
Cruz did not have a nervous breakdown. He handled the assault from this “impartial journalist” with aplomb, which must have driven liberal viewers nuts. I notice all the lefty blog headlines this morning are filled with breathless excitement about how Gregory “GRILLED!!!!” Ted Cruz, while studiously avoiding mention of what Cruz did when the heat on that griddle was turned up. Here’s the entire exchange:



Gregory’s assertion that the Cruz filibuster “hasn’t moved anyone” is the marquee moment. It’s quintessential media bias, a Beltway appartchik wishcasting in the middle of an interview. It’s a foolish, hyperbolic assertion that could not be backed up by any sort of empirical evidence; it is highly likely that some people have been moved, including people who already agreed with Cruz and were in need of a rallying moment. I notice Gregory and his colleagues don’t think it’s a pointless waste of time when Democrats do that.

They also don’t think Democrats get one shot at persuading the public, and pronounce it a failure if the polls are not rocked by immediate seismic tremors. The Left gets to spend years – and vast amounts of taxpayer money – shifting the tectonic plates of popular opinion, but when a Republican takes a stand that the majority of Americans already agree with, it’s a big flopperoo if 60 percent support doesn’t swell to 80 percent support overnight.

Speaking of which, Mr. Gregory, I noticed Barack Obama has been spending billions of our dollars to make us like ObamaCare, and – holy cow! – he hasn’t moved anyone. How do you suppose Ted Cruz would be doing if he had a nine-figure public-relations slush fund he could funnel to conservative groups, the way Obama has been laundering public money and handing it off to left-wing groups as part of his Affordable Care Act publicity blitz?

Why doesn’t David Gregory take his poll that allegedly shows public support for “upholding” the Affordable Care Act and show it to the one man in America most strongly opposed to upholding it: Barack Hussein Obama? No one except Obama has actually been violating this law, but he’s done it several times now. There has been talk of House Republicans introducing a measure to wipe out all the special waivers, exemptions, subsidies, and carve-outs Obama has been granting his political allies. Now that would be “upholding” the law!

Also, is David Gregory really the right person to be lecturing anyone about upholding laws? He got away with flagrantly violating the crazy gun laws of Washington D.C., purely because he is a powerful member of the ruling-class media elite.

Cruz has got to be exhausted from his efforts over the past week, but he was calm, reasonable, and cheerful throughout. (Barack Obama has flipped out and snarled at interviewers over far less confrontational treatment.) The do-nothing Democrats look awful by comparison to Ted Cruz, with Harry Reid arrogantly refusing to bring the Senate back in session, and President Obama off for yet another round of golf. The Democrats clearly believe the government shutdown narrative is so heavily slanted in their favor that they literally don’t have to do anything. They don’t think they need to offer the slightest pretense of working to find a compromise, because they think the shutdown will be blamed on Republicans, even if Obama’s playing the ninth hole at a golf course when it happens. They’re counting on people like David Gregory to carry their water in this fight… but if the cellar-dweller ratings of Gregory’s show perked up because Ted Cruz appeared on it Sunday, not many persuadable viewers are going to come away embracing the Democrat perspective.

If I were Cruz, I might have placed more emphasis on the fiscal argument against ObamaCare as part of the defunding drive: it’s a fabulous waste of taxpayer money in a time of budgetary crisis, so no fiscally conscious Senator should vote to fund it. Every Republican should be touting their alternative proposals more aggressively, because the Democrats and their media auxiliaries are going to keep pretending those proposals don’t exist. That’s particularly important as the emphasis moves to delaying ObamaCare. The American people need to know what they could have, instead of a broken fraud-riddled bureaucratic nightmare that kills a lot of jobs and insurance plans, without doing all that much in practical terms to expand coverage

And despite all their propaganda to the contrary, the people running ObamaCare know it. The Weekly Standard noticed that the HealthCare.gov website still has a page telling people without insurance to seek treatment at community health centers… and until it was mysteriously stealth-edited a few days ago, it told the uninsured how to get free medical and dental care. The URL for the page still includes the word “free.” Wasn’t the point of Barack Obama’s trillion-dollar-and-counting boondoggle to address the problem of “cost-shifting” by not merely expanding insurance coverage, but marching people into insurance plans at tax/penalty gunpoint? I wonder how much further expectations will be lowered, if we delay the rest of the Affordable Care Act to catch up with Obama’s illegally delayed employer mandate.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/09/3...ets-the-press/