Don't Be a Liar, Jennifer Rubin

Watch the sleight of hand as the Washington Post’s resident “conservative” (who recently played the race card against actual conservatives skeptical of the latest round of “comprehensive immigration reform”) turns a victim of peevish yelling into the perpetrator of said yelling.

The subject is Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz, Rubin claims, is “mocking” his colleagues in speeches back home in Texas.

The latest example comes from his talk to the conservative group FreedomWorks in Texas:

We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand and Mike and me and yelling at the top of their lungs — I mean really . . . And they said: ‘Why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home, my constituents are yelling at me that I’ve got to stand on principle.’ I’m not making that up. I don’t even bother to argue with them. I just sort of let them yell. . . . They said: ‘Listen, before you did this, the politics of it were great. The Democrats were the bad guys. The Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes. Well there is an alternative. You could just not be a bunch of squishes.” (emphasis added)

According to Cruz’s own remarks, other Republican senators are yelling at him for sticking to his guns — literally, in this case. Watch Rubin turn the whole story on its head, just to make Cruz look bad. First, she compares him to the “soft spoken” Rand Paul on one hand. The other hand tries the trick when she writes:

I don’t necessarily agree with [Paul’s] offerings, but he is trying to work within the Senate to accomplish his aims while being respectful and quite cagey.  He is trying to expand the party’s reach. What exactly is Cruz doing affirmatively to aid the country, the conservative movement and the GOP? Yelling at people and voting no don’t qualify. (emphasis added)

“Yelling at people…” Who was doing the yelling in the Cruz speech that Rubin quoted? Other Republicans, not Cruz. Cruz was being yelled at. But Rubin writes as though it’s Cruz who’s doing the yelling, to make him look like the angry, out-of-control type. If Jennifer Rubin were writing about Jennifer Rubin’s latest, she might suggest that Jennifer Rubin is a racist for attacking a Hispanic American.