Okay, if I heard right, Ted Cruz just said he had “spent much of his life in law enforcement.” We’re trying to verify all the points in Cruz’s resume. But this is silly. It’s not clear that Ted Cruz has ever served in any law enforcement capacity at all. Cruz is basically treating being a lawyer as “being in law enforcement.” But, no. First Cruz was a law clerk. Then he was in private practice. Then for less than a year he served in the Bush DOJ – but it’s not clear to me that it was in anything that could be called a law enforcement capacity. Next he was a lawyer at the FTC. Then he was Solicitor General of Texas. Cruz was a high flying lawyer for twenty years. As near as I can tell he’s never been in law enforcement. No, being a Supreme Court clerk is not being in law enforcement.
9:32 PM: I’ll say it again. Whatever Trump said, The New York Times has acted in an amazingly sleazy fashion with this Trump off the record story.
9:34 PM: I’m curious in what sense it’s a bigger punishment for Mexico if the wall is higher. Like, they’re going to say, we could live with 35 feet but 50 feet we just couldn’t ever accept that?
9:42 PM: This is reminiscent of when Megyn Kelly asked Rove on election night 2012 whether it was “just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?”
9:46 PM: “You went to Manhattan.”
9:49 PM: This debate definitely has a different feel that the last GOP debate. There’s not more attacks on Trump. But more of them are landing. They have more cudgels to use him. I’m really not sure it’ll work. But it’s different. Note that he’s getting the crowd back on his side here by embracing war crimes. That’s the deeper theme that this election is about.
9:54 PM: Ted Cruz spent “most of his life in law enforcement”? Really.
And here’s the video of Donald Trump bragging that his penis is really big. Because that already happened in the first ten minutes of the debate. After the jump …
9:03 PM: Feel like crowd is more Trumpy this time.
9:06 PM: Rubes: Donald did it first!!!!
9:07 PM: Seven minutes in and we’ve got dick jokes. Makes me confident Rubes physically attack before the night is out. Only question in my mind is whether Secret Service gives Rubes the protestor treatment if Rubes actually attacks.
9:10 PM: Rubio’s afraid to say “con man” in person.
9:13 PM: Trump’s ‘I haven’t started on her yet’ always gets the crowds going in a fairly gruesome way.
9:14 PM: Kasich: You keep writing me off and I keep losing and then you write me off again.
9:17 PM: I think Rubio lost the thread of that answer at some point.
So many things are happening right now – mostly with the actors in question having no clear plan for what they’re doing – that it’s very hard to know where our politics will be a week from now let alone in six months. But there’s one thing we can see clearly and it’s worth noting: top Republican stakeholders are breaking a lot of china right now that will be very, very hard to unbreak. What seems most relevant to me is that almost all of this is being done with no clear sense of an end-game or even a clear plan.
Chris Christie just a few moments ago: “No, I wasn’t being held hostage.”
TPM’s Lauren Fox is at CPAC today and found a lonely presentation by a GOP strategist which approached self-parody (emphasis added) …
“We make it so easy for them to make villains out of us,” Madrid said. “We just fall into the trap over and over and over.”
“Do you have suggestions about what we should say,” one CPAC attendee asked in the hall after the official presentation.
“Don’t talk to people the way you wouldn’t talk to your family,” Madrid responded. “I am not going to give you silver bullet words. I am just going to say don’t say bad things. Don’t offend people.”
Trump campaign official arrested by FBI on charges tied to Bundy Ranch standoff.
In some ways Mitt Romney’s emergence as Twitter elder snarksman of the Republican party is stranger than Donald Trump’s emergence as frontrunner. His speech today is obviously meant to be a weightier affair, a graver denunciation of Trump and Trumpism. But here’s video from 2012 where a gushing Mitt accepted Trump’s endorsement and praised him to the stars.
Yes, I know, politician’s are hypocrites. Big surprise. But still. Watch the video – after the jump. I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of it.
Many of you will remember this. Back in 2013 there was a disruption at a CPAC panel on race. Not surprisingly, the panel topic was a version of ‘the Democrats are the real racists.’ The actual panel was entitled “Trump The Race Card: Are You Sick And Tired Of Being Called A Racist When You Know You’re Not One?” But there was a sort of audience revolt in which attendees got up and started saying, ‘No, wait, we’re the racists.’ It basically went downhill from there. Here’s Benjy Sarlin’s write up from 2013 (he was there in the audience as it happened.) One of the ringleaders was a guy named Matthew Heimbach. And he’s now one of the guys who’s attacking black protestors at Trump rallies. Specifically, he was the one attacking that woman at the event Tuesday in Kentucky.