Mother Jones’ Character Assassination of Cruz’s Winning Political Strategist

Mother Jones is so upset that Ted Cruz  hired a consultant who’s capable of winning elections, the magazine smeared him by invoking a Missouri-based controversy even it admits he hasn’t genuinely been linked to. The magazine waited until deep in the second paragraph to point that out.

It was no surprise on Monday when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) formally announced his presidential bid. By last summer, he was making key hires for his campaign crew. And this included recruiting a controversial Missouri-based political operative named Jeff Roe, who is known for his ruthless, bare-knuckled style and who has recently been in the news due to a tragic death.

What Mother Jones is doing here is absolutely akin to what it pretends to be denouncing. Forget that the tragic events in Missouri aren’t linked to Roe, let’s spend a couple hundred words writing about it before bothering to point that out. This is a shameful act of character assassination on the part of Mother Jones, plain and simple. And it shouldn’t be ignored.

Following the apparent suicide last month of Missouri state auditor Tom Schweich, who was a Republican gubernatorial candidate, Republican legislators and party elders in the state denounced the toxic culture within the state GOP and pointed to it as a cause of Schweich’s death. And some cited Roe as a prime purveyor of the political hardball and scorched-earth tactics that have transformed many Missouri elections into mud-drenched campaigns of personal destruction. There’s no evidence linking Roe to the anti-Semitic “whisper campaign” that seems to have deeply troubled Schweich in the days prior to his death. But Roe’s merciless style has been legend in Missouri for over a decade. And now he is poised to practice his brand of political blood sport against Cruz’s 2016 rivals.

What may be bothering Mother Jones the most is what NRO recently pointed out – Of Course Ted Cruz Could Win. It’s far too early to tell much of anything when it comes to presidential politics 2016. But not too early for MJ to try to force one or another conclusion by falsely maligning a political combatant. Besides that, it’s not even really news that he works with Cruz. He’s done so since 2014. Just ask Talking Points Memo, assuming MJ writers can also read.

You won’t find liberal outlets such as MJ bashing a David Axelrod as ruthless, or maligning him as vicious, etc … but no one who knows anything about American politics at the highest levels would expect anything else from an effective (read that winning) political operator. What this is really about is a sort of stage management, wherein liberal media does what it can to make it difficult for Republicans to not just win, but even fight effectively. Meanwhile, they consistently give those on their side a free pass.

In the end, the current media firestorm surrounding Ted Cruz, from his family (thanks to supposedly respectable media outlets like BuzzFeed and Bloomberg), to his consultants, as in today’s Mother Jones item, what liberal media may be telling us is who they fear the most. Ironically, it’s always a conservative, more so than simply a run-of-the-mill Republican.

The media hasn’t appeared this worked up over a candidate since they did anything and everything they could to malign, if not politically destroy, Sarah Palin.