In this week’s The New Yorker magazine, Dexter Filkins wrote a rather astonishing story about a character by the name of Qassem Suleimani. Also this week, Ted Cruz engaged in performance art on the floor of the Senate. He performed 20+ hours of public speaking, quickly dubbed a ‘fauxlibuster’ on Twitter.
What do these two guys have in common? How are they different? Let’s discuss…
First off, who is this guy Suleimani? Iranian…Republican Guard…veteran of the Iran/Iraq war…apparently from Dexter’s piece, the controller of most all things middle east, at least in the Shia world these days. Responsible for helping bring Al Qaeda into Iraq after things started going badly for Americans there (you know: 15 minutes after the fall of Baghdad and the removal of the Saddam statue). Responsible for bringing Hezbollah into the Syrian conflict. Hard liner. Obviously the action arm of the mouthpiece of the Iranian revolution, Ahmadinejad.
And this guy Cruz? Ivy League law graduate, Hispanic roots, Senator from Texas and Tea Party darling of the moment..an identified troll.
How are they alike? In some ways, they are both terrorists. Both use ‘it’s my way or else you’re evil’ rhetoric. Both seem to strike fear in the hearts of their colleagues.
How are they different?
Ted is all about becoming the New 
Newt, making outrageous statements that are extensively covered by the media, and generally trying to be the center of the Tealiban universe. Qassem prefers to maintain a low profile…in fact, you must admit until I wrote this you’d never even heard of the guy, right?
So why am I writing this piece?
Because I believe both of them will be pawns in a major chess game that could well change the arc of current events.
What is happening in Syria is the tip of the iceberg atop a boiling cauldron of change throughout the middle east. What is happening on the floor of the Senate with the “Ted Talk” is the tip of the ice cube atop a big gulp of liquid nitroglycerine. I would argue that, metaphorically speaking, the GOP and Iran are about to pass each other on the road to transformation. Let me explain.
Why all of a sudden did Dexter write about this guy? Did someone put him up to it? Are the conciliatory overtures currently coming from Iran a direct challenge to Suleimani’s influence and power? Sure has all the appearances of a power struggle to me.
Ted is a one man 24 hour news cycle. Insightful articles have been written about him and his aims by Molly Ball of The Atlantic and Alex Pareene of Salon. Reading both articles, one could come to the conclusion that Ted and 
Rand Paul are currently in a power struggle to be “The Big Dunker” of the Tea Party. The Republican Party is struggling to figure out who it wants to put up in the next election cycle. Two ‘safe’ candidates have failed to capture those GOP hearts and minds. Is it time for a bomb-thrower to make it to the top? Ted and Rand are striving to see who can be the more outrageous and alienate the most GOP mainstreamers to earn the title of 
“The Biggest Loser”. In doing so, both hard-liners expect to take over as the party favorite in the 2016 Presidential election.
Conversely, Iran is struggling to figure out how to transition from the bomb-thrower 
Ahmadinejad to an establishment candidate. They apparently figured out that the isolationist, bombastic and scary point man got them sanctions and threats of attack from stronger neighbors, both Muslim and Jewish, even if the U.S. turned out to be a 
paper tiger. So maybe they see the same handwriting on the wall I described in my previous piece. It’s better to compromise in order to survive. The Tea Party thinks in order to survive, it must never compromise. Interesting, eh?
I’ll finish my piece with a last, big thought:
Words Really Do Matter.
Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda 
Josef Goebbels knew that well, and ensured that the putative Fuehrer continually offended the elites, and used anti-Semitic rabidity to appeal to the baser instincts of his following. In 1990’s Russia, a guy named 
Vladimir Zhirinovsky behaved the same way, until it was determined that his father was Jewish. Cruz has taken a page right out of Goebbel’s and Lenin’s playbook. He accuses his opponents of allegedly doing what he is in fact doing; of believing what he himself espouses.
Here’s a verbatim comment on John Cassidy’s piece about Ted in the same on-line edition of the The New Yorker as Dexter’s. The author’s name is Carlian Schwartz. Note: the ACA is the Affordable Care Act, affectionately (or otherwise) known as Obamacare.
I was offended by some of Ted Cruz’s comparisons of the ACA to the Nazis–as was Senator McCain, who, unlike me, didn’t lose his family in the Holocaust.
If “Tea Party” favorites such as Mr. Cruz continue to promiscuously use Nazi imagery to diss the Dems, the facts remain that they have done everything they can to prevent job growth and slow the needed repairs/improvements to our physical and educational infrastructures to make the United States competitive again.
Unless you were Jewish, Gypsy, LGBT, or mentally retarded, Germans actually got better from the Nazi government from 1933-1942 (when the war Germany started based on lies and to seize resources started turning sour): jobs that paid to house and feed a family got created and the infrastructure was improved. All that the “Tea Party” does is hasten the transfer of resources from the majority of Americans to the 1%.
If this were 1942, the logical conclusion would be that the “Tea Party” was really a Fifth Column for the Axis powers.
The “Tea Party”–and Ted Cruz in particular–should be careful what they compare to Hitler. Most of us know better.
Mr. Cruz should have tried “Dancing With the Stars” instead of showing what a discredit to the Senate, to Princeton, and to Harvard Law School he is with his mouth.