Bush To Cruz: Have Self-Restraint In ObamaCare Fight

by JASmius

Jeb, just for the record.  And yeah, I know, Bush.  Dangling that name in front of the Tea Party is like winging garlic cloves at Edward Cullen.  Or whispering "ObamaCare" in the ear of Senator Cruz.

If they ever needed an additional reason, Jeb just gave it to them:

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has a word of advice for fellow Republican Ted Cruz: Show some self-restraint in the fight against ObamaCare.

"I think the best way to repeal ObamaCare is to have an alternative," Bush told ABC's Jonathan Karl in an interview aired Sunday on This Week. 

"We could do this in a much lower cost with improved quality based on our principles, free market principles … [and] show how Obamacare, flawed to its core, doesn’t work," Bush said....  

Bush himself told ABC, "It might actually be a politically, a better approach to see the massive dysfunction."

Just as a gesture of full disclosure, I haven't settled on any 2016 candidate yet, seeing as how I don't think there will be any 2016 election, so please don't interpret what I'm about to say next as any kind of endorsement.  But....Jeb does have a point, at least about having a free-market alternative to OCare.  For all of Senator Cruz's crusading, it's all been "negative" - getting rid of OCare.  As laudable and imperative as that objective is, it isn't enough.  People are going to ask, not unreasonably, "Okay, what's your plan?"  You can't fight something with nothing, and to date I haven't heard the junior senator from Texas mention anything about with what he would replace ObamaCare.  We believe in our ideas - free markets, constitutional liberties, et al - so why hasn't Senator Cruz, as the self-appointed generalissimo of the anti-ObamaCare campaign, invested any of his efforts in telling the American people what he is for, in addition to what he's against?  Ronald Reagan did that, and as I recall, he had a fairly good track record of accomplishment for the constitutional conservative cause.

Of course, Ronald Reagan also promulgated "the 11th Commandment" - "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" - which Senator Cruz is almost more obsessed with transgressing than he is bringing down the Unaffordable Careless Act:

Cruz has said he will not rule out anything, including another government shutdown, in his fight against Obamacare. In a CNN interview aired Sunday, Cruz called people like Bush "gray beards" who want to let Americans suffer in an effort to help the party politically.

And TPers get on my back for questioning Senator Cruz's motivations?  Does he even know or remember that not a single Republican voted for OCare?  And that a big reason why the Dems got in a position to ram it down our throats was because of tighty-righties like him pulling the plug on their own party in 2006 and 2008?  And wouldn't you all agree that Senator Cruz owes Governor Bush a profuse apology?

My friends, it's wisecracks like that that make it enormously difficult for me to take this man seriously.  I frankly have to question his grasp on reality, or at least arithmetic.  The Dems have ten more senators than we do.  They control the White House.  And they have proven, yet again, that there is no way on God's green Earth that they will EVER give up ObamaCare.  None of that is the fault of any "gray beards," and acknowledging that reality is no desire to "let Americans suffer".  The only way to change it is to <drumroll with kazoo fanfare> WIN ELECTIONS so as to get the power necessary to accomplish what Senator Cruz wants.  That is, after all, the system the Founding Fathers bequeathed us.  You'd think that a man who clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist would be at least dimly aware of that fact.

And he's contemplating reprising Shutdowngeddon in every last excruciating detail, which by no less than Albert Einstein's definition is, how shall I put this, insane?

At this point the name "Ted Cruz" is in a dual race to determine which distinction it will attain first: "Biggest self-parody" or "most enemies made in the shortest amount of time."  If the Texas senator were a "gray beard," he'd be Irving Zisman.  What he most vociferously is not is a leader.  Leaders inspire, leaders persuade, leaders convince, and that's why others follow them.  What leaders do not do is pre-emptively piss in the faces of their natural allies with a fire hose.  After all Ted Cruz has done to alienate the GOP, why would any of them follow him anyplace?

But I'll indulge the question again: What is Senator Cruz's plan for making six Democrat senators and Barack Obama, or five Democrat senators, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama, or twenty-two Democrat senators and fifty-eight Democrat representatives change their minds and vote with Republicans to terminate their century-long dream of socialized medicine?  Outside of insulting his co-partisan colleagues, we never saw it the first time around.  I think he owes it to all of us to make that full disclosure before he tries to drag us, backwards, through that same bunghole once again.