Trump, Cruz look like fools
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump had a good day last Tuesday.
Not just because they each won primary elections.
But predictably, they both used the tragic terrorist attacks in Brussels to convince America that they know how to easily prevent those kinds of things.
They each have Superman complexes. But they stand for half-truth, injustice and the un-American way.
Donald Trump wants to torture people.
“They can chop off heads and drown people in cages, heavy steel cages, and we can’t waterboard,” he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
We can’t waterboard for a number of reasons.
First, it’s against international law.
If Trump ever bothered to read Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, he’d learn that “outrages upon dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment and torture,” are forbidden under international law.
And second, there’s still no proof that waterboarding has ever led to anything but false confessions.
But supposing Trump wants to just stop at waterboarding.
That’s not the case.
He wants to go further.
“We have laws that we have to obey in terms of torture. They have no laws whatsoever they have to obey,” he told Blitzer.
Blitzer told Trump that Salah Abdeslam, one of the perpetrators of the November Paris attacks, had already started cooperating with Belgian police, without being tortured.
Trump, tough guy that he is, responded, “He may be talking but he’ll talk faster with the torture.”
Even during the most politically charged aftermath of the CIA’s revelations about waterboarding (that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times), nobody from the Bush administration ever called for garden variety torture.
Trump, though, had to compete for big-bully honors with his nearest campaign competitor, Ted Cruz.
Cruz balked at Trump’s claim that the United States should torture people.
“America has never engaged in torture and we’re not about to,” he Tweeted.
Cruz, like Trump should do a little reading before he makes such statements.
Sitting Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, must have overlooked that 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, that revealed far more examples of borderline torture than Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s 183 cases of waterboarding.
Instead of greenlighting torture, Cruz would employ a different presidential tactic.
It’s something that drew even more scorn than Trump’s.
“We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized,” Cruz claimed.
Just where are all of those “Muslim neighborhoods” in the United States?
Unlike in Europe, where Muslims may find themselves marginalized in specific neighborhoods, in this country, they’re generally assimilated.
Cruz may find support among those voters who believe there are large enclaves of freshly-radicalized Muslims hiding in plain sight in this country, but he’s drawing guffaws from people who know better.
“I remind the senator that he lives in the United States of America, and the statements he made today is why he’s not gonna become the president of this country, because we don’t need a president that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country,” said New York City’s Police Commissioner Bill Bratton.”
Bratton wasn’t finished. He told the media that he has 900 Muslim officers in the New York Police Department, many of whom do double-duty as active members of the U.S. Military, “something the senator has never seen.”
Ouch!
Meanwhile, Cruz’ and Trump’s presidential opponent, John Kasich, took the occasion to sound reasonable about his proposed actions after the Brussels attacks.
“We are not at war with Islam – we’re at war with radical Islam,” Kasich told reporters in Minnesota.
Unfortunately, most of Arizona’s Republican voters aren’t that interested in Kasich’s reasonableness.
That night, Kasich finished fourth in the three-candidate race in Arizona’s primary election.
Marco Rubio, who’d dropped out of the race a week earlier, got nearly 18,000 more votes than Kasich.
It seems Arizona has one of the more active early-voting systems. Voters could submit their ballots 30 days before the actual primary election.
Most of those votes for Rubio were submitted while he was still in the race.
It’s all just one big mess, isn’t it?
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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