Chad’s Morning Brief: Ted Cruz a Top Tier Candidate, Stop Being Offended By Trevor Noah, and Other Top Stories
Here is your Morning Brief for April 2, 2015.
Cruz 2016
Well the early announcement has seemed to have paid off. According to at least one poll, Senator Ted Cruz is officially a top-tier candidate for the Republicans. According to the Texas Tribune, Cruz now joins the company of Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in the polls.
The survey by Democratic-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) shows Cruz's support among Republicans across the country has jumped from 5 percent to 16 percent in just over a month. His latest standing puts him in the company of two early frontrunners in the race for the GOP nomination, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
Cruz's biggest improvement has been among voters who call themselves "very conservative," PPP noted. Cruz now leads that category with 33 percent support, three times his number just over a month ago.
Cruz's rise appears to have most hurt Walker and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Carson's overall support has dropped 8 percentage points since the last time PPP polled national Republicans on the 2016 race. Walker has taken a hit among very conservative voters, a group he was winning before Cruz threw his hat in the ring.
Cruz now comes in third among the overall field polled by PPP, bested only by Walker at 20 percent and Bush at 17 percent.
Not bad for a Cruz campaign that was laughed at just a week ago. To be fair, I expect Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, to all have their own rise in the future when they announce. For Cruz though, this is huge. The media right off the bat attempted to brush Cruz off but he has shown promise in raising money and name ID.
Where will Cruz go from here? Staying up top will be the goal but next two weeks could get bumpy as Rand Paul and Marco Rubio may jump into the race.
Comedy
Comedy Central announced that comedian Trevor Noah would be taking over the Daily Show when Jon Stewart leaves. After the announcement people on both the left and the right started attacking Noah for tweets and jokes he had made in the past. In his past, Noah had made fun of women, fat people, black people, white people, Americans, Jewish people, etc.
People were suddenly offended that a comedian made offensive jokes. Some of these same people are also treating the Daily Show job as if it were lead anchor for NBC Nightly News.
As was written in National Review, if you are one of those people... you just don't get it.
That’s not debatable; it’s logical. If you think that these tweets mean that Trevor Noah is a fattist, sexist, racist anti-Semite who hates white people and Israel and America, you simply don’t understand how language works, how comedy works, or both. As I wrote yesterday regarding the Jamie Foxx-is-transphobic outrage, making a joke about someone does not mean that you hate that person. “Making a joke about” and “hating” are not synonymous, and using them interchangeably is not only ridiculous but also literally wrong. Furthermore, the way that comedians learn what works is by learning what doesn’t. In comedy, there’s no other way to figure this out but the hard way. You can’t really know if people will laugh at something until you try to get people to laugh at it. You can’t be afraid to swing and miss. They’re growing; they’re figuring out what works, and if you’ve ever spent even a few minutes at an open mic you’d realize that it’s very common to try to get laughs by being overly, distastefully offensive — a description that fits Noah’s mistake perfectly.
Everyone, Trevor Noah is a comedian taking over a satirical news show on a comedy network. Stop being outraged about this. Stop being offended by comedy. There are too many important things going on in our country. Trevor Noah taking over the Daily Show isn't something you should get worked up about.
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