For sheer political audacity, Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz takes the biscuit jar for comparing himself to John F. Kennedy, saying the former president would be a Republican nowadays.
That is about as likely as Cruz agreeing with Senator Bernie Sanders on a massive tax rate hike for the rich.
Cruz made his comments while speaking in Massachusetts, but he may well have been in LaLa Land with the comparison.
Here’s a senator who said he was looking forward to seeing if sand glowed red, a clear allusion to a nuclear strike against ISIS which would kill hundreds of thousands if not millions of innocents as collateral damage.
Kennedy, on the other hand, ignoring his war hungry generals, refused to use the nuclear option during the Cuban missile crisis and negotiated a way out with Khrushchev, the Russian leader, as the world held its breath.
Cruz no doubt would have taken General Curtis LeMay’s advice and turned Cuba into a parking lot with a resultant unwinnable war. No doubt Cruz would have agreed with LeMay's statement about negotiating with the Russians that, “This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.”
Cruz also said Kennedy believed in freedom of religion and so does he – unless of course it is Muslims you are talking about at which point it stops at the border.
Kennedy believed religion was irrelevant to political hiring and smartly put away fears about his Catholicism.
Cruz, though, wants religion everywhere. “If you don’t begin every day on your knees asking God for His wisdom and support, I don’t believe you’re fit to [be president],” he feels.
Also, Cruz urged Evangelical Christians to outvote secular Americans as “nothing is more important than having people of faith stand up and just vote our values, vote biblical values and that’s how we turn the country around.”
That's just what the country needs, a religious litmus test for president in 2016.
Has Cruz learned nothing from the past when religious prejudice kept many religions out? As his fellow Texan and failed presidential candidate Phil Gramm stated when asked his religious views, “I ain’t running for preacher.” Cruz would be our first preacher president.
Even his revisionism on tax cuts is extraordinary. Kennedy wanted to take the top rate down from 91 percent to 67 percent. Cruz wants a flat tax of 10 percent which would enormously enrich the wealthiest and bankrupt the government.
Kennedy was also passionately committed to safety net welfare proposals while Cruz, with his revenue through the floor from his flat tax, would gladly do away with programs like Medicaid and the Housing and Urban Development agency.
Cruz believes that the Tenth Amendment delegates far more power to the states on spending issues, while Kennedy was an advocate for more federal government, not less, to ease the burden on the poor.
Under Cruz we would have a Christian theocracy with every position, especially critical ones such as seats on the Supreme Court, subject to litmus tests based on religious principles.
Kennedy required no such tests and gloried in getting the best people irrespective of background to serve with him.
So knock it off Cruz. You’re no JFK, or even a shadow of him. You remind us more of dopey Dan Quayle than any recent Republican candidate.
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