Cruz snaps: Don’t mock my campaigning kids

There’s a gentleman’s agreement in politics that kids are off-limits. As vicious as the political discourse can sometimes get and as hard as politicians and would-be politicians go after each other, attacking someone’s children or family has always been considered a below-the-belt kind of punch. And that goes for the media also.

Attacks on kids are frowned upon for the simple reason that a candidate’s family, his or her kids in particular, are “non-combatants.” Also, a lot of times, they’re genuinely little children.

This controversy has jumped front and center since the Washington Post ran an editorial cartoon depicting the young daughters of Republican Presidential Candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) as monkeys. Among the questions asked are:

1. Since Cruz used his daughters in a political commercial where he slammed Democrats, are they fair game? 2. Would the reaction to the mocking of the senator’s kids be different if Cruz was a Democrat?

Actually the answers to these questions are readily available, since a similar incident happened in 2008 when a reporter who asked if Hillary Clinton was exploiting her adult daughter was suspended for two weeks.

The offensive Cruz cartoon, drawn by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes, displayed the Texas senator in a Santa suit turning a Jack-in-the-Box that making his two daughters, shown as monkeys, dance. The cartoon’s headline said, “Ted Cruz uses his kids as political props.”

In reporting the incident, most of the media rightly said that a candidate’s children are off limits. But, then, in a passive-aggressive obscuration, they tried to soften the attack on the four- and seven-year- old girls by questioning the senator’s use of the incident for campaign fundraising, or by opining that the Washington Post cartoon was a gift to his campaign. Even the Washington Post, whose editor pulled the cartoon (saying it was their policy was not to go after a candidate’s children), ran a column explaining the incident away as a gift to Ted Cruz.