The right-wing distraction machine has shifted into high gear. Now Republican presidential wannabe Ted Cruz is seizing on the bizarre notion, advanced by fringy right-wing ideologues, that the alleged Planned Parenthood shooter, Robert Lewis Dear, is a trans woman.
And he’s doing so as a way to distract from the increasing evidence that Dear’s terrorist assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic might just possibly have something to do with abortion.
Here’s what Cruz said earlier today, as reported by the Texas Tribune.
“The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that,” Cruz said.
When a reporter reminded Cruz it has been reported Dear made a comment about “baby parts” while being apprehended, Cruz retorted, “It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and transgendered leftist activist, if that’s what he is. I don’t think it’s fair to blame on the rhetoric on the left. This is a murderer.”
That’s right. Cruz wants us to think that it’s as silly to conclude that Dear is anti-abortion as it is to conclude that he’s a “transgendered leftist activist.”
Cruz is also fighting against the notion that an armed assault on a Planned Parenthood clinic that left three people dead should be called terrorism.
Asked if we could call the shooting an act of domestic terrorism — as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has — Cruz again urged caution about drawing conclusions from the shooting at this point.
“I would call it a murder, and we’ll see what the facts are,” Cruz replied. “It was a multiple murder of what appears to be a deranged individual. And it was horrific, it was evil, and we’ll find out more out about the facts, but I don’t think we should jump to conclusions.”
Nothing to see here!
H/T – Thanks to AnAndrejaPejicBlog, the first person to let me know about this
Ah, I apologize for being overly-generic. While I said primary, I really meant “primary or caucus” and was just using primary because they’re generally generically referred to as “the primaries” when discussing them as a block.
Virginia actually is an example, unless you meant the presidency specifically.
In 2013, Bob McDonnell, Republican, was the sitting Governor. Bill Bolling was his Lt. Governor and Ken Cuccinelli was his Attorney General. Bolling announced all the way back in 2009 that he would run for Governor in 2013. Cuccinelli announced in 2011 that he was going to run against Bolling in the 2013 primary. In 2012, the party leaders decided to cancel the vote and just declare Cuccinelli their guy. Bolling was absolutely furious.
Cuccinelli went on to lose the general against the Democrat, McAuliffe. Bolling would probably have beaten McAuliffe, so it’s hard to guess what the Republicans were thinking.
I was actually in Virginia for that one; what happened was that the party committee decided to hold a caucus instead of a primary. According to predictions this favored Cuccinelli so drastically it was basically the same in practice as declaring him their guy and Bolling withdrew from the race because it was effectively unwinnable.
Basically, any registered republican (Virginia primaries are open, but apparently that doesn’t apply to caucuses) could show up to a day-long event in a specific physical location to cast votes for candidates. Cuccinelli supporters tended to be more ardent and more willing to take a long drive and then spend an entire day at a political event to support their candidate. I think the motive was to try and reconcile the party leadership and the hard right wing, since relations had been growing increasingly strained. Apparently it didn’t work, going by what happened to the Majority Leader in the next year.
Completely unsurprising news: Dear was listed as female due to clerical error.
http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2015/12/01/3726754/clerical-error-robert-lewis-dear-transgender/
BTW TERFs sometimes refer to themselves as Gender Critical. They even have their own horrible space on Reddit.
http://www.politicususa.com/2015/12/01/republican-excuse-falls-clerk-admits-error-planned-parenthood-shooters-registration.html
What do you suppose these conservatives narrative is going to be now? If it changes at all?
Thanks for all the info on the US political process. Wow, I’d never cope with that. It’s only when people say “Did you vote today?” at 5 to 10 that I remember it’s a general election.
@ Rosa
“The clerk mis-gendered him. You know who else has been called out for mis-gendering? germane Green. She’s a famous feminist. It’s feminists fault”
Some variation on that perhaps?
@Alan
Perhaps. It makes about as much sense as any explanation they’d come up with.
Failed bank robbery.
I’m not kidding.
Honestly half the reason everything is so complicated is because the two major parties have a vested interest in making life hard for serious third party contenders. The way US states generally run elections basically guarantees that either there will be two major parties or one major party will cackle manically and win virtually every election. The presidential election has the votes for states (except Maine and Nebraska) assigned to whichever candidate gets more votes than any other single candidate, and then whoever has a simple majority of the electoral votes becomes president; if no one has more than half it goes to the House Of Representatives for the tiebreaker with weird voting rules. This has happened exactly twice, and the resolution of the second time appears in history textbooks under the header “The Corrupt Bargain” because the third-place guy threw his support to the second-place guy and then got appointed to a high office after the second-place guy won.
As a result, the political parties really want to keep their base cohesive and supporting a single candidate; if they splinter the other party is almost guaranteed the presidency and has very good odds of sweeping the legislature too. So they’ve got the elaborate primary systems to make sure that their supporters really like the selected candidate and won’t switch their vote to an independent, and various airtime rules and such are equally fair to all parties over a certain size threshold that just happens to only include two parties. This is also part of why a party will hold contradictory positions like cutting government spending and expanding the military; they actually represent multiple groups with competing desires who are cooperating for strategic reasons.
Apparently the UK uses the same sort of system for selecting members of parliament but your parties haven’t done the same strategic mergers, and lots of other countries have more complicated ways of calculating winners, either assigning parliament members in proportion to the number of votes for a party or “instant runoff” where everyone ranks candidates in order of preference, and they count up all the votes then remove the candidate with the fewest votes, take ballots counted for that candidate and count them for the person who is next on the list, and repeat until one candidate has over 50% of the vote.
There’s also some pressure from how the Electoral College votes are assigned. Each state gets one elector per member of either house of the legislature. The Senate has two members per state; members of the House Of Representatives are assigned based on population but each state gets at least one. This is because when the Constitution was written the smaller states wouldn’t agree to representation purely by population and the larger states wouldn’t agree to equal representation for all states regardless of population. So sparsely-populated states have fewer people per vote and tend to get catered to more heavily, particularly by the Republicans, who are stronger in rural areas than urban ones, and the presidential primaries kick off in the 30th and 42nd largest states, which tend to clean out most of the clown car. One of these states is big on farming. It is probably not a coincidence that the farming lobby has a lot of national influence.
@SFHC
…Did someone claim that?
@Rosa
Put the softest pillow you can find on your desk before you click this.
@M:
I do not often deploy harsh language. I feel that it is necessary to do so here.
http://cdn.meme.am/instances/400x/56246228.jpg
@SFHC
This is how I feel about this:
http://trekgate.tumblr.com/post/61982857952
You know it’s bad when you have Wesley Crusher facepalming.
eh Im just trying to avoid internet squabbles in general. I dont like this culture of hostility, people nitpicking and name calling at strangers, I find it triggering tbh
Anyways, even if this incident was a bank robbery (lol), it doesnt erase the entire history of people killing abortion providers. These people act like this is the only such incident.
@SFHC
What. The. FUCK.
There’s just no reasoning with people who are deaf to anything that doesn’t agree with their worldview. Surely Ted Cruz can’t weasel out of this one quite as easily. Please tell me that at least he is receiving well-deserved mockery for jumping to conclusions.
(Let’s see if this will post right even though I’m not signed into WordPress right now.)
For your amusement (for certain definitions of that word): State lawmaker representing Denver weighs in on the shooting: http://news.yahoo.com/lawmaker-planned-parenthood-real-culprit-violence-203130449.html
For better reading, there’s the tale of the mountain lion that spent 20 years of its life in the back of a pickup truck being set free, or at least as free as can be done with an animal that’s never learned how to survive in the wild: http://www.fuzzfix.com/circus-cat-takes-first-steps-to-freedom-after-20-years-in-chains/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=YahooDesktop
@Argenti “mrex — yeah, I know, but it’s fucking infuriating. You want to claim you’re against abortion cuz it’s murder? Be consistent at least and don’t decide that removing a dead body from inside a living one is unacceptable when, and only when, it’s one that got there via pregnancy.”
Yah, I figured that’s where you were going. I just wanted to comiserate with you. -_-
@ guy
Thanks for that, very interesting. It also helps explain why there’s so much emphasis on the early primaries in what seemed like otherwise inconsequential states.
FYI, our previous government just past was a coalition (Tories and Lib-dems); that lead to some interesting compromises.