That's the way to do it! Senator Ted Cruz knocks a left-wing reporter's questions right back at him

I caught Ted Cruz's interview after writing yesterday's post about how to respond to left-wingers who ask "When did you stop beating your wife?" questions - i.e. the standard "You're a racist, homophobe, xenophobe" play which so many right-wingers allow themselves to be snared by. The question to Cruz (about whether he has a "personal animosity" against gay Americans) is a classic of the genre. The worst possible answer would have been "No, I don't," followed by some apologetic nonsense about having gay friends or employing gay workers or actually thinking that anal sex sounds like a whole lot of fun. Cruz would have been on the back foot right from the start and viewers would have been left with the conviction that he actually wanted to see all homosexuals burn in hell.  

Instead, Senator Cruz took a leaf straight out of the Ben Shapiro playbook (see previous post, here) and attacked the questioner's motives and his sense of morality - i.e. he did to the morally preening, aspersion-casting leftie exactly what lefties invariably do to right-wingers. See? It's not that difficult! As Shapiro puts it, we on the Right must not let left-wingers "frame" us in this way - if they accuse us of being bigots, point out their own deep-seated prejudices; if they accuse us of being morally deficient, point out the contradictions and failings in their own moral stance. Tories and Ukippers take note - this is absolutely the way to handle hostile, loaded questions from what James Delingpole calls The Wankerati. Drag them off their moral high horse.

I like Bernie Goldberg, a former liberal CBS news man who eventually saw the light and wrote an excellent exposé of media bias called Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News, published in 2001. But, here, he's wrong - absolutely wrong. The very last thing Cruz should have responded with was "Of course I have no animosity against gay Americans! Next question," because that would have begged the follow-up question, "But there are lots of Republicans - especially amongst the Christian Right - who hate gays: do you wantt hem to leave the Republican Party?" Or the reporter would have quoted something anti-gay Cruz had once said. Cruz would have been on the moral back foot instantly, desperately defending himself and his party. Which would have been dumb. And which is exactly what so many right-wing politicians do when up against the leftist bully-boys of the BBC and (to a lesser extent) Sky News.

We really must stop playing their game - we're smarter than that.