Constitutionalist Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas hasn’t yet announced whether he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, but that doesn’t matter to the liberal media. They are going after him before he even makes his announcement in a way they never dared examine Barack Hussein Obama.

The first of what will undoubtedly be a great many examples is a recently published article in The Daily Beast. Titled, “Ted Cruz at Princeton: Creepy, Sometimes Well Liked, and Exactly the Same,” the article focuses on Cruz’s college days, alternately painting the Texas Republican as a sexual deviant, problem gambler and intractable extremist who would impose his worldviews on an unsuspecting populace in a way that fundamentally alters the political landscape.

Let the hit pieces begin

While the writer of the story, Patricia Murphy, manages to toss in some obligatory nods to Cruz, quoting a couple of college friends who said good things about him, she mostly focuses on a few isolated incidents that are likely taken out of context to tar and feather Cruz. And, of course, her references and sources are presented without rebuttal to form what is known in journalism circles as a classic “hit piece.”

From the article:

When Craig Mazin first met his freshman roommate, Rafael Edward Cruz, he knew the 17-year-old Texan was not like other students at Princeton, or probably anywhere else for that matter.

I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?” Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.”

At the conclusion of her piece, Murphy quotes Mazin again: “We should be afraid that someone like that has power.” On his potentially becoming president? “I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Absent from Murphy’s piece, of course, is any similar scrutiny of Mazin, so we as readers are don’t know what kind of man he is, how credible he is or is not, and whether any of their mutual classmates would find him as distasteful as he finds Cruz. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

There are more examples.

Hey, what about Obama’s college records?

On Cruz’s intractability – an attempt to portray him as someone who will be dismissive of anyone who disagrees with him or as someone who is not interested in compromising with his opposition (sound familiar?):

“It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views.”

— On Cruz’s constitutional conservatism, which aims to portray him as an extremist ideologue who sees no value in political and philosophical positions taken by opponents (again, sound familiar?):

“He’s not someone who shifts in the wind,” (friend David) Panton says. “The Ted Cruz that I knew at 17 years old is exactly the same as the Ted Cruz I know at 42 years old. He was very conservative then, and an outspoken conservative. He remains strongly conservative today.”

And:

“More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said. “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he’s saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing.”

Finally, the hit piece also attempts to paint Cruz’s beliefs as out of touch – anachronisms of an earlier time in America that is out of date and no longer valid or proper:

The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.

Ted Cruz may or may not wind up with the GOP nomination for president in 2016. All indications are, however, is that he will at least seek it. So expect more of the same kind of treatment of him by the Left-wing extremist media – the same media cabal that has steadfastly refused to call out Obama for his mysteriously sealed college records.

Sources:

http://www.breitbart.com

http://www.thedailybeast.com

http://www.rootforamerica.com