Posted on 01/15/2016 1:44:07 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Because Cruz kept a repeat offender in prison, Brooks says he's not a good Christian.
David Brooks does not like Ted Cruz. In an escalating series of attacks, Brooks has gone from saying that Cruz doesn't "live within the confines of reality" and is "nakedly ambitious" - a "selfish Machiavellian" - to now saying that Cruz's rhetoric is "Satanic" or perhaps "Mephistophelian."
But Brooks really tears into Cruz in his latest column, arguing that his speeches are "marked by what you might call pagan brutalism." He claims that Cruz's "career and public presentation" are devoid of "the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace." To bolster his argument, Brooks highlights the Supreme Court case of Dretke v. Haley, claiming that it presents Cruz at his pharisaical worst, "applying the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy."
Brooks not only mischaracterizes the case, he does so in a way that indicates that he's the one lacking in charity - that his hatred for Cruz is impacting his professional judgment.
Here's how Brooks describes the case:
In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.
Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.
Cruz is terrible, right? Rather than let Haley go, he vindictively pursued the case all the way to the Supreme Court to keep a relatively harmless calculator thief in prison, right?
Not so fast. It turns out the facts are more complicated. Haley was a two-time felon, previously convicted of delivering amphetamine and of robbery. The calculator theft was his third felony, and under fairly typical state statutes mandating far more draconian penalties for three-time felons, he was sentenced to a lengthy prison term.
But here's the catch - he committed his second felony (the robbery) three days before his amphetamine conviction became final. For the habitual-offender provision of Texas law to apply, the second conviction had to occur after the first conviction became final. No one caught this mistake (including his defense lawyers) - not at the trial level or in either of his two subsequent state-court appeals.
When his defense team finally identified the mistake, he filed first a state, then a federal habeas corpus application. The issue before the Supreme Court was extraordinarily complex, dealing in part with the "actual innocence exception to procedural default of constitutional claims challenging noncapital sentencing error." (Got that?) And far from pursuing the case vindictively and viciously, Cruz admitted that Haley had a "significant" ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim and promised that Texas would not reincarcerate Haley while he litigated that defense.
The end result? Cruz won a narrow victory on the point of law before the Supreme Court, and the case was remanded to lower courts, where Haley was resentenced to "time served."
The issue before the Supreme Court wasn't about "compassion" at all but rather about a set of legal arguments that could have widespread impact on federal criminal practice. Cruz was arguing a point of constitutional law that, if he had lost, would have permitted - in Justice O'Connor's phrase - "judge-made rules" that "would have the unhappy effect of prolonging the pendency of federal habeas applications as each new exception is tested in the courts of appeals."
The sad truth is that pundits, the secular public, and all too many Christians confuse "nice" with "Christian." Thus, they judge one's authentic Christianity by superficial measures such as tone, or define concepts such as justice or mercy through a non-Christian lens. In reality, however, the finest of Christians adopt a wide variety of dispositions, and even the most winsome and gentle find themselves rejected and scorned if they hold firm on questions of life and sexual morality. An authentic Christian simply cannot "nice" his way into elite applause.
Brooks - perhaps because he doesn't follow Christian news closely - has perhaps missed those events where Cruz's true compassion shines through. When I was a senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice, Cruz - along with Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham - was one of a very short list of senators whom we could count on to speak up for the persecuted church. He was the only senator to attend a prayer vigil for Pastor Saeed Abedini, an American still being held hostage in Iran merely because of his Christian faith:
Is that video an example of Cruz's "pagan brutalism?" What about his persistent efforts to defund Planned Parenthood or his stalwart defense of religious liberty? I understand the establishment fury at Ted Cruz. His rhetoric has been tough - and so are their shots right back at him. But on substance, he's consistently correct.
I knew Cruz just a bit back in law school (he was a year behind me). I haven't spoken to him since. So I can't testify as to the state of his heart or how he treats his friends and family. I can't speak to his core character. But his anger at the Obama administration is justified, and his anger's electoral appeal will be tested again and again in coming months. And before anyone accuses him of paganism or Satanism, recall that he follows a Savior who once declared, "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword," and said of his critics, "You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear outwardly beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness."
Anger, by itself, is not a sign of unrighteousness, and it is quite telling that Brooks's big attack piece relies on an extraordinarily misleading characterization of a single Supreme Court case. If Cruz is so "pagan" - so "Mephistophelian" - then surely examples abound. If they do, then share them. If not, in attacking Cruz for his tone with language that exceeds anything that Cruz has said even about his worst political enemies, Brooks isn't a defender of Christian charity - he's a hypocrite.
Brooks' writing on sociology has been criticised for being based on stereotypes and presenting false claims as factual.[57][58] In 2004, Sasha Issenberg, writing for Philadelphia magazine, fact-checked Bobos in Paradise, concluding that many of its comments about middle America were misleading or the exact reverse of the truth.[59] He reported Brooks as insisting that the book was not intended to be factual but to report his impressions of what he believed an area to be like: "He laughed...'[The book was] partially tongue-in-cheek'...I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being 'too pedantic,' of “taking all of this too literally,' of 'taking a joke and distorting it.' 'That's totally unethical', he said." Brooks later said the article made him feel that "I suck...I can’t remember what I said but my mother told me I was extremely stupid.”[60] In 2015, Salon found that Brooks had got 'nearly every detail' wrong about a poll of high-school students.[61]Michael Kinsley argued that Brooks was guilty of "fearless generalizing... Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke."[62] Writing for Gawker, which has consistently criticised Brooks' work, opinion writer Tom Scocca argued that Brooks' career since 2004 had been marked by supporting political stands based on moral judgements and disdaining those citing evidence or statistical research, noting that "possibly that is because he perceives facts and statistics as an opportunity...to work mischief."[63]
In 2016, James Taranto criticized[64] Brooks' analysis[65] of a U.S. Supreme Court case,[66] writing that "Brooks’s treatment of this case is either deliberately deceptive or recklessly ignorant."[64] Law professor Ann Althouse concurred that Brooks "distorts rather grotesquely" the case in question.[67] Brooks was previously criticized for having "scrambled the actual significance of what the Supreme Court has done", as Lyle Denniston put it.[68]
Law professor Ann Althouse concurred that Brooks "distorts rather grotesquely" the case in question. Brooks was previously criticized for having "scrambled the actual significance of what the Supreme Court has done", as Lyle Denniston put it.
Thank you.
I’d like a bit of “Spartan belligerence” directed at the enemies of civilization.
Score Rubio +1 for this:
^When you talk about immigration. Ted Cruz, you used to say you supported doubling the number of green cards, now you say you’re against it. You used to support 500 percent increase in the number of guest workers, now against it. You used to support legalizing people here illegally. Now against it. You used to say you were in favor of birthright citizenship. Now you are against it. Not just on immigration, you used to support TPA, now you are against it. I saw you on the Senate floor flip your vote on crop insurance because they told you it would help you in Iowa. And last week we saw you flip the vote on Iowa for the same reason.
That is not consistent conservatism. That is political calculation.^
Do you know what thread you are posting in?
No wonder Rubio has you in his clasped greasy palm.
So who’s David Brooks...?
David Brooks should become an immigrant and leave us.
* RULE 4: "Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules." If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)
Brooks is just another liberal media whore doing whatever he can for the cause.
Bump!
My first reaction: “Who the hell is David Brooks?” Just another lefty newspaperman? Excuse me, columnist. Oh, sorry, Journalist! And for the hallowed NYT.
That qualifies him to play Judge, Jury and Pope on Cruz’s virtue. Bring on the Cruz Inquisition! Bishop Brooks says so!
What a bizarre piece. Brooks has a serious adjective addiction, the sure sign of a writer desperate to impress.
I always find it informative and downright stunning when a person who supports secularism presumes to scold the rest of us about what is “Christian”. Now, I put the word Christian in quotes because a lot of what secular people call Christian is really a shadow or a remnant of true Christianity, like the kind found in the text of the Bible.
To the extent there are Christian values in our mainly-secular society, they are far more “Christian themed” than truly Christian.
An example of this can be found on this very forum where we would see people who are living with a member of the opposite sex without being married, and yet they post complaints that same-sex marriage is a violation of Christian values.
But secular people and especially those in the media and in academia are “hell-bent” (as a manner of speaking) to destroy every vestige of Christian values in our society. They do this even though they have not clearly thought out what values they propose to replace them with, except they fully intend those values to be thoroughly Progressive.
“Left-wing journalist accuse those of us who believe in traditional values of being somehow ‘Satanic’. I didn’t know they thought that was a bad thing…”
Ted Cruz
Brooks is actually engaged in “Two Stage Alinskyism”
Stage 1: Define the other side’s rules for them.
Stage 2: Make the other side live by them.
Brooks defining (incorrectly) what it means to be a Christian, then demanding that Cruz live by that definition, is an example.
Now we know why he fits in so “seamlessly” at the NYT.
: )
Yes.
We do.
Yup, Salon and left-wing Wiki trolls posting carloads of lieaganda from other lefty writers ... those are my own lodestars by which to judge the political insufficiencies of liberal writers.
Meanwhile, Brooksie is still a leg-humping Obama trouser-fetishist and all-around wuss.
If you have something other than your ass in your hand then share it.
Like Cruz, he was born in Canada with a US citizen parent.
I used to think somebody who was hated by people all across the political spectrum couldn't be all bad, but David Brooks is convincing me otherwise.
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