If you're somehow curious as to what Ted Cruz's response would be as President to abortion clinic violence, it's exactly what you'd expect it to be, as he displayed at a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday.
Speaking to reporters after a stop here Sunday afternoon, Cruz rejected a potential connection between anti-abortion activism and the shooting, instead taking issue with "some vicious rhetoric on the left blaming those who are pro-life.” The shooting, which happened Friday in Colorado Springs, left a police officer and two civilians dead, and a suspect, Robert Dear, has been taken into custody.
"The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that," Cruz said.
When a reporter reminded Cruz it has been reported Dear made a comment about "baby parts" while being apprehended, Cruz retorted, "It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and a transgendered leftist activist. If that’s what he is, I don’t think it’s fair to blame on the rhetoric on the left. This is a murderer.”
Cruz's claim appeared to be based on a voter registration form that lists Dear's gender as female. "We know that he was a man who was registered to vote as a woman," Cruz said.
Asked if we could call the shooting an act of domestic terrorism — as former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has — Cruz again urged caution about drawing conclusions from the shooting at this point.
“I would call it a murder, and we’ll see what the facts are," Cruz replied. "It was a multiple murder of what appears to be a deranged individual. And it was horrific, it was evil, and we’ll find out more out about the facts, but I don’t think we should jump to conclusions.”
Cruz is a couple hash browns short of a Waffle House on the best of days, but this is calculated. Just days after Republicans started screaming that Democrats couldn't protect us from scary brown Muslims who would shoot us up and kill us all at shopping centers on Black Friday, the people actually killing folks (including cops) in places of business are Christian right-wing anti-abortion soldiers.
Ergo, the right can't have this reality be reality. It reminds voters that there might be people more dangerous to average Americans than ISIS, and that our terrorism problem isn't with Muslim fundamentalist nutjobs, but the Christian ones.
That would mean the threat to America is white Christian guys with guns, and we can't have that, hence Cruz's bonkers assertion that the guy is a "transgendered leftist murderer" and not a right-wing white guy with an AK-47.
Voters might ask questions about the kind of rhetoric the GOP has been using in the wake of those Planned Parenthood videos earlier this year, you see. And we can't have that.
The terrorists we have aren't the right kind of terrorists, you see. People who kill Iraq War vets, campus cops, and married mothers of two have to be Muslim terrorists on a rampage (or worse, liberals) not right-wing Christian conservatives blasting people in abortion clinics.
And they will deny Colorado Springs forever.
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