Joseph Farah Offers Bizarre, Nonsensical Endorsement of Ted Cruz

Last updated on September 25th, 2023 at 01:55 pm

It was without a great deal of surprise that I read yesterday of birther Joseph Farah’s endorsement of Ted Cruz – just in time for Cruz to lose, and lose big, last night. This, Farah was careful to note by the way, was a personal endorsement in his role as editor and founder of World Net Daily and “not a corporate editorial endorsement.”

Farah began by saying, “It’s been a strange 2016 election cycle.” But what is more strange yet is a man who accused President Obama of not being born in the United States now endorses a man not born in the United States. Farah’s selective birtherism has not escaped media scrutiny.

Of course, Ted Cruz is white. Not sayin’. I’m just sayin’.

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And it’s not just Cruz. Back in 2012, Farah claimed questions about Romney’s eligibility were an unnecessary distraction for “his team” at WND and would you please stop asking?

Romney, too, is white. Obviously an American, seems to be the logic.

Farah says of the Democratic candidates, “Pick your poison” without any apparent trace of irony. Of course, you have to be a skilled liar to run a gossip sheet like World Net Daily. He could hardly be honest and expect people to go along with what he is peddling.

But that’s a larger problem for the entire Republican Party, where facts just get in the way of a really good story. Nobody knows that better than Donald Trump, who bulldozes through facts with an elephant’s savoir faire.

From that alone you would think Trump would be the natural choice for Farah, but he went with Cruz. Farah tells readers he doesn’t want to “slight” Donald Trump, who afterall performed the valuable role of “breaking the back of political correctness” with his Hitler impersonations, but Cruz is “the real deal.”

I think Ted Cruz’s history demonstrates he has the clearest, most Reaganesque vision of where the country needs to go in its much-needed recovery from eight years of Barack Obama. Cruz is principled, sophisticated and a solid conservative whose understanding of and commitment to the Constitution is unshakeable.
 
At a time when one of the three branches of the federal government, the Supreme Court, hangs in the balance, it is Ted Cruz who, without question, can be counted upon to nominate justices who will uphold the high standards of Antonin Scalia and the originalists.
 
Ted Cruz is the real deal.

Farah’s endorsement would not be complete without comparing Cruz to Reagan, who would not even be considered Republican if he were alive today. ‘Tax and Spend’ Reagan not only raised taxes but grew the federal government. If Cruz is actually like Reagan, there is no better reason for Republican voters to reject him.

Of course facts have nothing to do with it. They never do. This is all about what Farah and other Republicans want to be true.

What is amusing is that while appealing to the past with his comparisons, Farah accuses Clinton and Sanders of having nothing to offer but the past (isn’t that what he just told us Cruz is offering?).

More remarkable still is that in the very next breath he tells us this past has nothing to do with the past 240 years of American history:

It’s also time for all freedom-loving Americans to consider what the Democratic Party nominee has to offer for the future. What Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have to offer is the past. They offer a vision that has nothing in common with what has made America great over the last 240 years. Neither believes in the rule of law, the oldest and greatest Constitution in the world, a free-enterprise system that has made the country the envy of the world, individual rights, Judeo-Christian values, national sovereignty and strictly limited government.

Let’s see. America became a world power thanks to the guy who pulled this country out of a 1-percenter-induced Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat accused of being a socialist.

I don’t think Farah thought this through.

It’s a mystery past, apparently. If you can’t wedge it into the past 240 years, the entirety of American history, you’re at a loss to make sense of his claim. If you figure it out, let me know.

When Farah goes on to claim that America “simply can’t survive another corrupt and lawless White House,” you can only assume that he does not realize it is no longer 2008, the end of a span in which the Bush administration vied with that of Ulysses S. Grant as the most corrupt in American history.

Republicans of 2016 have been very careful to ignore the economic revival of the past seven years, and their rhetoric is always aimed at 2008, while casting the blame for the economic disaster at Obama, and not on the man they like to pretend never existed, George W. Bush.

Farah’s is a fact-free, even nonsensical interpretation of American history in the finest tradition of that religious education specialist, David Barton, who thinks owning copies of original documents bestows magic powers of interpretation, as though even without having to read them – by merely being in their presence – he becomes an expert.

Of course, this is how Religious Right-style Christians, Farah among them, thinks the Bible works too.

Unfortunately, that is not how the world works. Facts do matter. They matter quite a bit. You can reject them, but you can’t escape their effects. What you don’t know – what you pretend not to know – can still hurt you.

As Republicans discovered in both 2008 and 2012.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.