DuPage GOP Should Rescind Sen. Cruz Speaking Invite

 DuPage GOP Chairman Dr. Darlene Ruscitti should rescind her invitation to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to be Keynote Speaker at their Lincoln Day Dinner this Friday.

Sen. Cruz has engaged in incendiary, non-productive, false and destructive speech unbecoming of any public official, much less a sitting US Senator.

A previous post on Sen. Cruz detailed how he promoted his political rise amongst the Tea Party faithful by once telling a Texas Fourth of July political rally that there were more Commie professors at Harvard than Republican professors. He then said his predecessor at Harvard Law, Barack Obama, would have made a great Harvard Law School President, since he's the most radical president in US history, making him right at home amongst those Reds who believed in Communist overthrow of the US.  Such talk is not only false and hateful, its dangerous. When a prominent politician makes such incendiary charges and characterizations against a sitting President, one can only ponder the disturbed individuals who will lap up those words of hate speech and consider them a call to action. No wonder the President has received an unprecedented level of threats.

It would be bad enough if Cruz actually believed such outrageous talk, but he's simply making it all up to excite the Tea Party extremists who formed his base for gaining a Senate seat. Are we to believe that Cruz uncovered this Commie Conspiracy at Harvard Law, a plot no one else was privy to, and then stayed in spite of that for three years simply to punch his ticket to fame and fortune via the best law degree available? Guess what law school Cruz will tell his kids to strive for if they want to follow daddy in the high stakes arena of law and politics. There won't be a single mention of Commie Profs when Junior fills out his Harvard Law application. Cruz is simply an opportunistic cynic who knows what red meat to throw the gullible crowd pining for a movie star handsome, silver tongued messenger of hate and divisiveness. 

DuPage GOP Party Chairman Dr. Ruscitti, the Regional Superintendent of Schools in DuPage County, should know better than to give a public forum to a demagogic figure who will malign the sacred profession of education for unseemly political gain. Least she view this merely as a partisan attack, she should consider the editorial words of the far right New York Daily News, demanding New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox cancel his invitation to Sen. Cruz to address the May 29 NY state GOP $1,000 a plate dinner:

"Two choices are offered to New York Republican Chairman Ed Cox: Cancel plans to have Texas Sen. Ted Cruz headline the party’s annual dinner or speed the GOP’s long demise in the state. In featuring Cruz as the prime speaker at the May 29 affair, Cox has entered a death embrace with New York’s political Public Enemy No. 1 of the moment. Cruz represents the unthinking, doctrinaire strain of conservatism that doomed Mitt Romney’s electoral chances, such as they were, and threatened to alienate Republicans from key voting blocs, including Cruz’s fellow Hispanics."

Nor is this a matter of denying free speech. Sen. Cruz has every right to walk outside his door or stand on the Capitol steps and howl at the moon for hours about Commie Profs at Harvard and the most radical President in US history if he chooses. But every one of us, whether officeholder or concerned citizen, who deeply cares about solving the serious problems we face, should not give a platform to a charlatan who uses the grand opportunity of public service to infest our body politic with cynical, extremist talk.

This is one time when the confluence of politics and education weighs heavy on the crown of Dr. Ruscitti. Let's hope she gets this one right.