Retroactionary Watch: Cruzin'

Still-Canadian* Senator Rafael Edward "Ted" Cruz Faces the Nation (via PoliticusUSA):

Well, Bob, with all due respect, I don’t agree with the premise of your question. Throughout the government shutdown, I opposed a government shutdown. I said we shouldn’t shut down the government. I think it was a mistake that President Obama and the Democrats shut the government down this fall.

The reason they did so is that President Obama dug in and said he wouldn’t compromise and he wouldn’t negotiate. In fact, I went to one of the most surreal meetings I’ve ever been at, where President Obama invited all the senate Republicans to go up to the White House. He sat us in a room. This is in the middle of the shutdown.

And he said, “I invited you here to tell you I will not negotiate. I will not compromise on anything.” That’s why we had a shutdown. That was a mistake.

As to whether Cruz did or did not favor shutting down the government, Karl Rove, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and of course Grover Norquist would all beg to disagree (I didn't see the teevee but apparently Bob Schieffer himself was unable to refrain from laughing). As would Thomas Lifson writing at the "Free Republic" to congratulate Cruz on shutting down the government:

the government shutdown is turning out to be a brilliant political chess move on the part of Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee. The Obamacare disaster, fully predictable by anyone who understands the effect of incentives and the fundamental incompetence of academic theorists and left wing ideologues, has made the go-for-broke attempt to stop it an obvious profile in courage

Or as Cruz himself put it, he didn't want to shut down the government, he just wanted Republicans to do what they did in 1995, which was, as he said, to shut down the government:

We've seen this before, we saw this in 1995, when Republicans in the House shut down the government. What happened was it was a partial shutdown, there was some political cost to be paid, but at the end of the day, because Republicans stood strong in 1995, we saw year after year of balanced budgets and some of the most fiscally-responsible policies Congress has produced in the modern era. If we hold strong we can do that again.

And as Ron Weasley didn't say, that's not 11-dimensional chess, that's oxymoron chess, or maybe we could call it explosion chess, after the principle that given contradictory premises you can prove any proposition you want, including one that is self-evidently false!

What I'm really ecstatic about, though, is the retroactionary aspect of his account: How the White House meeting called by President Obama on October 2 2013 caused the shutdown that began on October 1. It's that dratted time-traveling atheist Muslim again!

*I love the Washington Times headline:

Sen. Ted Cruz hopes to shirk Canadian citizenship soon: report

I'd say he's been shirking his Canadian citizenship all along. As to his US citizenship, the jury is still out, although this supporter seems to have suspected him of not bothering to vote in his own runoff election because he wasn't doing jury duty, or something like that. Then again the tweeter is plainly insane.

@kellyhaney thanks so much for your vote!
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) July 24, 2012