Skip to main content

Lying Eyes

By



You have to hand it to Ted "Country Boy" Cruz.  He knows how to turn a seemingly harmless question into a political statement.  The amazing thing is that Rolling Stone didn't call Ted out on this.  It took Bill Maher to point to the blatant hypocrisy in the statement, with one of his panelists noting that Cruz will say literally anything to pander to the religious right wing, who is decidedly country when it comes to music.

It's not like "classic rock" musicians didn't respond to 9/11.  A huge concert was held at Madison Square Garden nine days later that had rock stars from around the world and across the political spectrum coming together to praise the first responders, with proceeds going to the ongoing recovery.  Among those were John Mellencamp and Kid Rock putting aside their political differences to sing Mellencamp's classic, Pink Houses.  Kid Rock comes in at about the 6 minute mark.  The Who capped off the evening with Won't Get Fooled Again, which I suppose could be taken many ways in the aftermath of the heinous attacks across America.

The memorable evening also included many television and movie actors, which the Right wing also loves to bash.  How dare those damn "liberals" tread on their "America First" domain!  The concert was later made into a film, directed by Spike Lee, Kevin Smith and Jerry Seinfeld, among others, with more proceeds going to the recovery efforts.  All together the rock event raised over $30 million.

One can understand Fox letting Cruz get away with these kinds of statements, but the mainstream media pretty much let it slide.  Of course, you probably don't want to call more attention to Cruz's outlandish statements than they deserve, but this guy is the ultimate fraud, and should be repeatedly called out as such, not allowed to say whatever he damn well pleases on national television with no repercussions.  

I chalk this up to the initial media flirtation with 2016's first declared presidential candidate.  Whatever his musical tastes are, it had nothing to do with the way rock and roll music responded to 9/11.  As the Eagles would sing, You Can't Hide Your Lying Eyes.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more