Missed Opportunites, Houston Chronicle

Regarding "It's all about Ted" (Thursday Editorial), I'll leave it others to provide detail on the gross double standard the Chronicle employed in its treatment of Ted Cruz's filibuster vs. Wendy Davis.  You're no doubt catching it with both barrels, and deservedly so.

 

Instead, I'd like to focus on the missed opportunities for the Chronicle.  You were determined to marginalize Cruz: you called his effort "a colossal waste of time"; you compared him to all other politicians and found him lacking; you criticized his character and concluded that his actions were "all about Ted"; but is it possible that there was something about his effort that actually served the American people?

 

Of course there was.  As Cruz so eloquently explained time and again, his strategy of rallying Republican senators to deny Harry Reid a cloture vote would have a number of positive outcomes, primarily that it would force all Democrat senators to go on the record as supporting Obamacare.  This would have been poison for red state Democrats in particular.  And if they had been forced to organize a super-majority to boot the bill out of the Senate, there would have been a prolonged and very public spectacle of Democrats working to preserve in its entirety the ever-increasingly unpopular Affordable Care Act.

 

Not coincidentally, your editorial fed perfectly into the Democrat narrative that Republicans that oppose them are "arsonists", "extortionists" or worse.  Obama one-upped himself yesterday by calling Republican opponents to Obamacare "crazy".  So, there you have it: there is no end to the pejoratives that Obama, Reid and Pelosi will heap on Republicans, and apparently nothing that they can say that the Chronicle is not willing to rubber stamp.

 

And therein lies the many missed opportunities for the Chronicle.  For one thing, you could have told the story about why it is that Republican senators like Lindsay Graham, John McCain and Texas' own John Cornyn would oppose Cruz so as to allow Red State Dems to scurry out of the spotlight.  You could have done a story on the frantic - nay, panicky - overreaction of Democrats to Cruz's efforts.  You could have done a story on the particular malady that causes Establishment Republicans to silently suffer the calumny of their Democrat colleagues and come away thinking that the only proper response to such gross demagoguery is to: throw Ted Cruz under the bus.  You could have done a story comparing the efforts of Ted Cruz to use Senate rules that allow an individual to bring the legislative process to a halt, and compared that to Wendy Davis' very similar effort on the issue of the Texas abortion law.  You could have done an article on the flood of exemptions to Obamacare that Democrats have granted, mostly to themselves and their cronies.

 

You also could have compared the so-called narcissism of Ted Cruz to that of, say, John McCain, who for several months has been using each and every Obama controversy to all but declare himself the Shadow President.  Seriously, has nobody up there noticed that McCain has been running around calling press conferences and making proclamations on everything Obama does?  It's gotten so bad that I find myself - as a Tea Party Republican - actually sympathizing with President Obama and wishing McCain would shut his trap.

 

Instead, you threw it all away.  When you bought into to the Democrat talking points, you shut the door on dozens of articles that could have enlightened and entertained your readers.  Now, the "Ted Cruz is a self-centered arrogant legislative arsonist" spiel is all you have left, and there is just purely no way you can say that more than once without looking like, well, you're repeating yourself.

 

What really gets me is that you even admit that last year during his senatorial campaign, Ted Cruz sat down with you and told you exactly what he was going to do in opposing Obamacare.  How refreshing that must have been, to have a politician tell you he was going to do something, and then actually do it!  I would have thought you would have at least given him some points for consistency, but no.  And in so doing, you missed another prime story-telling opportunity: comparing Cruz - the most honest Senator in generations - to the shifty equivocators that overwhelm the joint.

 

Now that is an article I would have been willing to read.

 

Pete Smith

Cypress