“I Prefer My Authoritarian Racial Profiling to be Less Vulgar”

Jeb! Bush has a candidate he wishes to endorse:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) presidential campaign on Wednesday morning, urging Republicans in a statement to prevent Donald Trump from securing the nomination.

“Ted is a consistent, principled conservative who has demonstrated the ability to appeal to voters and win primary contests,” Bush said in a statement, according to Politico.

“For the sake of our party and country, we must move to overcome the divisiveness and vulgarity Donald Trump has brought into the political arena, or we will certainly lose our chance to defeat the Democratic nominee and reverse President Obama’s failed policies,” Bush continued in the statement.

Here’s a useful summary of Cruz’s response to the Brussels terrorist attacks:

Following the attacks, Trump renewed his calls for expanded torture and excluding Muslim immigrants. Ted Cruz, not to be outflanked on the right, began with his customary denunciation of President Obama for refusing to use sufficiently inflammatory terms to identify the enemy (“we can never hope to defeat this evil so long as we refuse to even name it”). Sensing this might not be enough, he unveiled a new commitment, to “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” This is a breathtaking idea that merits deeper examination as evidence of what is now the policy stance of the putatively non-crazy candidate of one of our two major parties.

The great benefit enjoyed by the United States over Europe is its multicultural character, in which citizenship is not identified with a racial group. That multiculturalism has allowed American Muslims to assimilate much more easily than in Europe, which makes Americans safer — though not, of course, perfectly safe — from terrorism. Looking at this state of affairs, with a dangerous, ghettoized European Muslim population and a much less threatening, well-assimilated American Muslim population, Cruz proposes to treat American Muslims like European ones. He endorses racial profiling of “Muslim neighborhoods.”

Cruz does not even justify this policy as a response to radicalization. He proposes to do so, in his words, “before they become radicalized.” Cruz’s belief is that subjecting a non-radicalized population to discriminatory policing will prevent rather than cause its radicalization.

This is the kind of madness that now prevails for foreign-policy logic in this party. Cruz, of course, has appointed raging paranoic Frank Gaffney as a foreign-policy adviser. Gaffney has called Barack Obama “America’s first Muslim president.” Perhaps Cruz envisions the special law patrols to include the neighborhood of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to prevent the (further) radicalization of its Muslim occupant.

However, Cruz will engage in these systematic and counterproductive violations of civil liberties and civil rights with more formal language. The Republican establishment has its man!

…via Patesh in comments, Obama: “As far as the notion of having surveillance of neighborhoods where Muslims are present, I just left a country that engages in that kind of neighborhood surveillance. Which, by the way, the father of Sen. Cruz escaped for America.” Perfect.