That Awful Interview of Ted Cruz, and Why We Can Expect More Like It
Credit Reuben Navarrette for noticing a glaring double standard. Watching Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics interview Cruz recently, I wasn't just uncomfortable. I was actually nauseated. He told Cruz that people are curious about his "identity." Then, the host asked a series of questions intended to establish his guest's Hispanic bona fides. What kind of Cuban food did Cruz like to eat growing up? And what sort of Cuban music does Cruz listen to even now? I've known Ted for more than a decade and I could tell he was uncomfortable. But he played along, listing various kinds of Cuban food and saying that his musical taste veers more toward country. I kept waiting for Halperin to ask Cruz to play the conga drums like Desi Arnaz while dancing salsa and sipping cafe con leche -- all to prove the Republican is really Cuban. Just when I thought I'd seen the worst, it got even more offensive. Earlier that day, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, had entered the presidential race. So, Halperin said: "I want to give you the opportunity to directly welcome your colleague Sen. Sanders to the race, and I'd like you to do it, if you would, en español." What nerve, treating a U.S. senator like a trained seal! Who does this guy think he is, trying to evaluate how well a Hispanic speaks Spanish? And what does that have to do with being authentic anyway? Navarette points out that Housing Secretary Julian Castro and his twin brother, Representative Joaquin Castro (D., Texas) don't speak Spanish well, and that hasn't harmed their political careers nor their sense of "authenticity." Reporters can look pretty silly when they make assumptions about their interview subject's heritage. A little while back, Andrea Mitchell asked Julian Castro about his "Cuban-American background," to which he replied, "Well, I'm Mexican-American." I can understand the desire to go beyond the "tell us about your tax plan" line of questions. But Halperin came across as snide, presumptive, and arrogant, with the underlying tone of the questions suggesting Cruz was somehow faking his status as a Cuban-American. Jonathan Tobin: "With two Republican presidential candidates of Hispanic background (Cruz and fellow Cuban-American Marco Rubio) and one GOP hopeful that is a woman (Carly Fiorina) and another an African America (Ben Carson), the liberal authenticity police will be out in force. But rather than merely ignore them as Cruz, who kept his cool with Halperin did, this insidious bias needs to be shown for what it is: a desire by the media to delegitimize anyone who doesn't conform to their ideas about identity politics as interpreted through the catechism of liberal ideology." BuzzFeed's Katherine Miller observes, "Nothing really happened after the interview! Besides Rush Limbaugh, no one on the Internet seems to have noticed this happened for . . . nine days." Maybe that says something about who's watching Halperin's program? Is Legal Immigration Going to Split the GOP's 2016 Field? Over on the home page, I take a look at Scott Walker's recent focus on legal immigration, and how he's echoing Senator Jeff Sessions, who has been emphasizing that aspect of the issue in Congress. Walker and his team are quick to note that Sessions is only one of many people they're discussing the issue with, and Sessions and his team don't want to discuss private conversations. But the Sessions inspiration is pretty clear, and could have big consequences for how the GOP discusses immigration in the coming year. One of the other figures discussing immigration policy with Walker is Texas governor Greg Abbott. On March 27 Walker toured the Texas border with Abbott, visiting a Texas Department of Public Safety and National Guard joint command center in Weslaco. The two governors received a briefing on the border operations by DPS Director Steve McCraw and then took a helicopter tour of the border.  "It's a lot more complex to secure control of the border -- twists, turns, snakelike movements to it," Abbott told NRO. Abbott said he had DPS make a presentation to Walker about the extent of cartel activity on both sides of the border, and how far cartel smuggling activities reach into the United States -- all the way north to Walker's home state of Wisconsin. "I think it was an eye-opener," Abbott said. It's easy to picture a showdown in the early debates between Walker and say, Rubio, with each young Republican leader contending the other supports a legal immigration policy that is contrary to the nation's best interest. Sessions and others who want to see legal immigration reduced observe that advocates for legal immigration rarely mention specific numbers; most Americans vastly underestimate the number of people who legally immigrate to the United States each year (roughly 1 million). The numbers dispel any notion of the country being xenophobic or unwelcoming to new citizens. In 2013, approximately 41.3 million immigrants lived in the United States, "an all-time high for a nation historically built on immigration." The Census Bureau projects that figure to reach just under 48 million by 2020. In some media circles, urging a reduction in the current level of legal immigration is ipsp facto xenophobia, and tantamount to political suicide. But polling indicates that reducing legal immigration is actually pretty popular, and that very few Americans want to see the number of legal immigrants increased. In January, Gallup found 60 percent of Americans say they are dissatisfied with the level of immigration into the country today; of those, 39 percent say they want less immigration, and only 7 percent want more; those numbers have been broadly stable for the past decade.  In July, a survey commissioned by Reuters found 46 percent of American adults want the existing levels of legal immigration decreased, and only 16 percent want them increased. The D.C. Plastic Bag Tax . . . Helping Teach Kids to Milk a Cow When do-good government types claim that they're raising taxes to achieve a particular goal . . . well, keep a close eye on them. Sometimes money that's supposed to be used for a river cleanup ends up going to salaries and field trips: Despite the growing praise for the program, the reality is as murky as the Anacostia, according to a recent city audit and The Washington Post's review of the fund. Measurements for success are admittedly nonscientific and vary widely, and more of the fund money has been allocated for field trips for schoolchildren and employee salaries than to tangible cleanup projects on the river and its watershed. The largest grant from the fund so far, $1.2 million, will be paid over the next two years to send every D.C. fifth-grader on a two-night field trip at campsites outside the District, some up to 30 miles from the Anacostia River. Ten thousand children will participate in activities designed to provide a "meaningful watershed education experience," such as -- canoeing, talking about trash, conducting water-quality experiments and learning to milk a cow. That might be nice, but it's not what they said they would do when they set up the stupid five-cent-per-plastic-bag tax! ADDENDA: Age of Ultron's a hit . . . just not as huge a hit as Marvel has grown accustomed to: "Avengers: Age of Ultron" easily dominated the box office this weekend, though the superhero sequel lost more steam in its second week than its predecessor. The epic from Walt Disney Co.'s Marvel Studios collected an estimated $77.2 million in the U.S. and Canada, bringing its domestic total to $312.8 million—enough already to count as one of the year's biggest hits. But "Ultron," which cost roughly $250 million to make, continues to fall behind the original "Avengers" domestically. Its box office fell 60% in its second week, typical for a big-budget event film but steeper than the 50% drop seen with 2012's "The Avengers." The original was about $60 million ahead of "Ultron" at this point in its release. SPOILERS AHEAD . . . Rarely have I encountered a movie with so many terrific scenes that don't add up to thoroughly satisfying whole. Age of Ultron isn't bad. It's just a bunch of connecting scenes away from being the original-topping-epic that it wants to be so badly. So far I've enjoyed Marvel's ambitious attempt to bring the world of the comics to life, where the events in one superhero's world impact another's, and each hero's story, while capable of standing alone, is part of a large, interconnected grand narrative of heroes and villains on an epic scale. Age of Ultron is the first film from Marvel where the inter-connectedness starts to feel a little heavy. If you're a comic book geek or just keeping track of the blockbusters coming down the pike, Age of Ultron feels clogged with scenes that are intended as foreshadowing. Ah, Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are strongly disagreeing? That's building up to Civil War. Thor suddenly heads off on a mysterious journey? That's foreshadowing his next sequel. All the talk of the infinity gems? That's the set-up for The Infinity War. Keep in mind, Age of Ultron is a sequel to The Avengers, but also to Iron Man 3, Thor: The Dark World, and Captain America: The Winter Solder. So it's got a lot of previous stories to advance and a lot of stories to set up, while somehow attempting to tell its own story. Apparently Joss Whedon's original cut of the film was more than three hours, and that version probably had a lot of "connective tissue" that ended up on the cutting room floor. One glaring problem with Age of Ultron is that they put such effort into some aspects of the inter-connectedness while some other major developments from previous movies are just flat out dropped. If I had made Iron Man 3, I'd be a little irked that Joss Whedon and Marvel decided to just ignore a major plot point, namely Tony Stark destroying all of his suits of armor and effectively walking away from super-heroics to demonstrate his devotion to his love, Pepper. In this movie, not only is he back in the suit, he's once again deployed the "Iron Legion" of robot-like empty armor suits as backup. When the world -- and all of the Avengers! -- have accepted an artificial-intelligence–run team of robots doing mop-up work on extra-governmental counter-terrorism operations, well, we're halfway to creating Ultron already. Age of Ultron begins with an epic battle that would be the climax of most other films; we're thrown into the action so suddenly and intensely that I figured we would be getting the increasingly clichéd "three days earlier" reset. But no, we're told a little while into the film that the Avengers -- who seemed to all be going their separate ways at the end of the last movie, off to their own separate sequels -- have been holding "hunting parties," going after the villainous Hydra organization. This is all fine, except that Marvel currently has a television show, "Agents of SHIELD," which is all about what's left of SHIELD going after Hydra. You would think some character in that show would have mentioned these "hunting parties." (BTW, what is the public's perception of SHIELD right now? In The Winter Soldier, the world learned that SHIELD had been corrupted to its core by HYDRA, which is about one step away from neo-Nazis. Both the television show and these films are vague on whether the U.S. government or anyone else is cooperating with SHIELD, or even sanctioning its operations on its soil.) I realize the difficulty of pulling off a smooth plot interaction between an ongoing television show and a big summer blockbuster . . . but I think Team Marvel belly-flopped on this one. If I understood Agents of SHIELD correctly, Phil Coulson's big secret project for the past year was getting an old helicarrier up and running again. But when it appeared in the movie, with Nick Fury at the helm, nobody even mentioned Coulson.  | 
Comments
Post a Comment