(See update below.)
There’s been chatter today about Ted Cruz out saying McCain won’t help him hold hearings into protecting people’s 2nd Amendment rights on military bases. (Don’t ask.) He’s out there campaigning on this claim, raising money off it. But McCain gets asked about it and it’s not true.
You never know exactly who’s telling the truth when pols disagree over something. But Cruz admits it’s not true. He didn’t actually press McCain or even say anything to him. He just talked about it at the committee and he figured McCain was there. Also he pressed former Chair Carl Levin, who is actually not John McCain. Cruz now concedes that he “may have misspoken” in New Hampshire. But actually, he’s just a clown liar who apparently doesn’t know anybody is going to hold to him anything and he folds like a coward when someone calls him out. “Misspoke”? Really? The only thing worse than a liar is a dumb liar. But I will grant they’re much more fun.
It’s going to be a great campaign.
Late Update: Dave Weigel notes that Politico’s rendering of what Cruz said was subtly off saying he’d pressed the committee rather than McCain explicitly, thus setting McCain up to smack Cruz down. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Politico juiced a quote to make a story. (Thanks, Politico!) Here’s Weigel’s version according to his own tape recording.
“One of the things I’ve publicly called for on the Armed Services committee is for us to have hearings on why the military has a policy of not allowing soldiers to carry their firearms onto bases,” Cruz told a questioner at the Londonderry Fish and Game Club in New Hampshire. “I am very concerned about that policy. Now, I want to give an opportunity for military leadership to lay out their views as well, because they have opposed changing that policy, and I think the proper way forward is to have hearings.It’s one of the things I’m pressing. I hope the new chairman, John McCain, will agree to have those hearings.” (My emphasis.)
Then later …
According to my own tape of the quote, Cruz didn’t really misspeak. Pressing for a hearing in 2014 meant asking the Democrats to do it; asking for one now meant having a conversation with John McCain. Yet he said all this after his frequent riff on how he, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul fought against post-Newtown gun safety bills when few other Republicans would, leaving the impression that establishment senators were the real impediment to gun rights. His fundamental mistake might have been in floating the idea in New Hampshire before he’d vetted it with the staff of a senator who cannot resist taking a slap at him–and then, belatedly, offering a bandage and a peace pipe.
I think this last point is right and something of an understatement. Politico helped get Cruz in trouble. But how hard is Cruz pushing if the chairman of the committee (and guy who’s been on the committee forever) doesn’t know about it?
Still a liar. Still a coward. Still Ted Cruz.
