The Washington Post published a cartoon by Ann Telnaes of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz in which his daughters were portrayed as monkeys tied to an old music box he's shown cranking. Post editor Fred Hiatt yanked the cartoon off The Post's website after some conservatives criticized the newspaper for breaking the cardinal rule of leaving the candidate's children out of politics. "It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it,"Hiatt said. "I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published. I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree."
Telnaes was unapologetic. "I’ve kept to that rule, except when the children are adults themselves or choose to indulge in grown-up activities (as the Bush twins did during the George W Bush presidency)," Telnaes wrote. "But when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game." I don't recall Telnaes making any cartoon parodying Obama's daughters, who have been frequently used as props by him at White House events and in his past political campaigns.
Breitbart notes that children of Republican candidates never seem to be off limits when it comes to the mainstream media.
13 comments:
I understand the cartoon. Cruz really really likes to use his pretty little daughters in his ads. I understand that too. But it gets a little irritating. So some jaded cartoonist thinks he's a puppet master using his trained little monkeys to drum up his numbers. I think they ought to leave the kids out of it. But what does he expect. They're everywhere in his ads. Nobody's supposed to say a thing? For those of us who think Cruz has a horrible voting history and stands for everything wrong about the Evangelical conservative branch of the Republican party, this deliberate attempt to soften his harshness by using his little daughters seems deliberate and kind of in your face. If he's trying to protect his daughters' privacy he's doing a pretty bad job of it because they're all over the air waves and on stage a lot at rallies. Not a crime. And it seems mean to equate them to trained monkeys, but Cruz isn't this warm and fuzzy guy, he has a mean side, and a politically shrewd side, and people are going to think he's playing us with all this warm and fuzzy when he's a fire and brimstone hell and damnation guy down underneath.
Cruz is a terrible hypocrite himself. When the Founding Fathers of the United States drafted the Constitution, they envisioned a country where its citizens had the freedom to practice any religion they chose. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “neither Pagan nor Muhammadan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth due to his religion.” They didn’t want the citizens of the newly founded nation to face the same persecution that was so prevalent in the countries they had fled from. The Republican Party is filled with politicians who fetishize the words of our Founders to the point that they invent quotes from them to justify their absurd proposals and often use the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom as an excuse for their bigotry. Ted Cruz is one of the worst offenders. His distorted and cherry-picked interpretation of the Constitution was on full display, in what will come as a surprise to nobody, when Cruz promptly abandoned the principles upon which he’s based his entire insipid candidacy on, and voted in favor of religious discrimination against Muslims in a direct rejection of the religious liberty he claims to hold so dear and the words of the Founding Fathers that he claims to respect so dearly.
Nope. When politicians use their children as pawns in the political sphere, they are fair game!
anon 1:36
How does Cruz using his daughters in a fluff ad justify a cartoonist calling them "trained monkeys"? No seriously, how does this justify it? If Cruz uses his daughters to attack his political opponents or shill for some policy or another then I'm game, but this was a fluff ad that didn't really delve into politics beyond coming from a candidate.
A Republican Congressional staffer was fired and her parents stalked by the media after she posted a facebook comment critical of the Obama daughters and the media acted like it was the end of the world.
Can anyone point out where a cartoonist from the Right mocked Sasha and Malia? Surely there is a gary varvel cartoon out there that did this? No?
The Double standards is the point here. The fact is every candidate uses their children as props to some extent or another, Democrats apparently get to do this with no criticism ( Obama loves to use his daughters to push 'Climate Change' legislation)
I'm not a fan of Ted Cruz, but I don't decide how I stand on a particular issue based on my personal opinions of a person. Cruz is not constitutionally eligible to run for president. He was born in Canada as the son of a Cuban citizen. He's not a natural born citizen.
He was a citizen at birth by virtue of his American mother. She could have given birth in any country and he would still be a natural born citizen, because, he didn't need to be naturalized, like a foreigner would, in order to become a citizen. He was entitled to it at birth by virtue of his mother. Its just like military families, John McCain particularly, who was not born in the United States but was born to a couple of Americans out of the country because of Dad's military service. Yes, Natural born citizen. People who feel like someone must be born on American soil to be natural born are hard to to find. Really, no one believes that. And the founders, who never exactly defined natural born citizen, nevertheless debated the subject, and only meant to exclude foreigners from being President. A child born to an American mother is clearly a natural born citizen, requiring nothing more to be a citizen after birth. But we know you love a controversy.
Natural born citizens are natural born because they are citizens by virtue of their birth within the United States to U.S. citizen parents. If Cruz was a natural born citizen, then it would not have been necessary for him to rely on a statute passed by Congress, which allowed his mother to register his birth abroad expressing her desire to make him a U.S. citizen based upon her plan to return to the country at some point. If his mother had decided not to register his birth, he would have been SOL. Natural born citizens require no additional steps to acquire citizenship. Their U.S. birth certificate is automatic proof of their natural born citizenship status. Citizenship can be acquired through a variety of means: (1) natural born; (2) 14th Amendment (born within jurisdiction of U.S. w/o regard to parent's legal status; (3) statutorily conferred by virtue of being born abroad to at least one U.S. citizen parent; and (4) persons naturalized as citizens after becoming permanent residents for the requisite time period. Only the first category are eligible to run for president. The fact that we have elected officials and judges who have chosen to disregard the U.S. Constitution does not change its original meaning.
That's not true Gary. Even if she had not registered him, he would have been a citizen. I was raised in a military family. Lots of children are born abroad. If their parent is a citizen of the US, then they are a citizen of the US. Period. You are wrong that whatever his mother did was a necessary act. It just smoothed the birth certificate process. He was a citizen automatically by virtue of his birth, and thus, natural born. Everyone knows that, and no one interprets it differently. You're just stirring up trouble.
McCain was born in Panama. Cruz fact checker? Jefferson may have written anything he wanted but each State at that time had established religions and the Constitution did NOTHING about that because it's limitation applied only to the Federal Government being then established in a new form. Some States, by the way, continued their established religions into the 1840's and religious tests for office until the late 1800's.
All this birther stuff is of no account, as Paul might suggest, Trump was born in some other alien world but still leads the polling.
He was not born to two U.S. citizens, anon. 4:10. She had a physical presence requirement she had to meet. At the time Cruz was born, if she had not physically resided within the U.S. for a period of at least 10 years, five of which had to have occurred after she reached the age of 14 prior to his birth, she could not claim citizenship for him. After 1986, that residency requirement was reduced to 5 years, two years of which had to have occurred after the age of 14. That's why the registration is so important so it can be determined whether the parent attempting to acquire citizenship for their child had resided in the U.S. for the minimum period required by statute to confer citizenship on him. There was an unfortunate case recently decided where the Court denied citizenship to the son of a U.S. citizen who was born at a military hospital base in Germany. The Court found that the military base didn't confer 14th Amendment status on the child, and that his father had not resided in the U.S. for the requirement time period to confer citizenship on him. His attorney complained that the decision essentially left him without a country because his mother had subsequently divorced his father and moved with him to Jamaica where he had never acquired citizenship. Congress does not get to decide who a natural born citizen is. That term is found in the Constitution in just one place--in the context of the eligibility to be president of the U.S. It has nothing to do with the Naturalization & Immigration Act, which has conferred citizenship in a variety of different ways throughout the country's history. A natural born citizen isn't a moving target. I realize that doesn't sit well with people who think the constitution can be amended by judges and politicians who don't think they should be bothered with the hurdles that must be crossed to legally amend the constitution.
George Romney dropped out of the 1968 presidential race rather than defend a challenge to his candidacy filed by the Manchester Union-Leader because of his birth in Mexico where his parents (both U.S. citizens) had fled to avoid prosecution for practicing polygamy in the state of California. Some constitutional scholars argued that McCain was ineligible because of his birth in a hospital in Panama, not on a military base. The Senate passed a special resolution in 2008 opining that he was eligible in response to the claims of those constitutional scholars, including one from McCain's home state of Arizona. We still don't know where the hell Obama was born or who his true parents were to make a determination about his eligibility. We know that he once went by the name Barry Soetoro in Indonesia where he had acquired citizenship at some point under circumstances that are still unknown. There are claims of an adoption by an Indonesian step-father, but there are nothing more than anecdotal claims from questionable sources to prove that.
You state that Sen. Cruz "voted in favor of religious discrimination against Muslims." Please provide the link to the roll call vote so that we can check.
Gary........we would have to dig up Frank Davis to find out for sure! You can't hide the nose, ears......and spots!
The BC and his eligibility has always been misdirection. It's not that it's fake, It's WHY it's fake. It's impossible for Obama to be his father. Genetics don't lie.
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