Geraldo: Cruz's 'New York Values' Quote Was 'Coded Message'

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was using coded language when he decried "New York values" leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Fox News' Geraldo Rivera said Thursday.

"I don't think Cruz breaks 15 percentage points" in New York, Rivera said on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor."

"I think that he's going to get routed in New York and deservedly so," Rivera said. "Aside from the stinking anti-Semitic implications that I see in that whole 'New York values, money and media' coded message that he put out there pandering to those Iowa voters… he also voted against Hurricane Sandy relief, he also voted against compensation for the 9/11 victims. This is a man whose interests are absolutely antithetical to New York."

Host Bill O'Reilly agreed on the 9/11 victims vote, but said Rivera was off base on the anti-Semitic statement.

"I have lived here my whole life, as have you," O'Reilly told Rivera. "If he says New York values to a bunch of evangelicals it's not anti-Semitic. He's pointing to [New York City Mayor Bill] de Blasio, to [New York state Gov. Andrew] Cuomo, to the progressive crew."

But Rivera argued that Cruz could easily have made his argument with different words, but "cunningly" chose the words he did.

"He could have said Democratic liberal free-spending, wealthy," Rivera said. "There's a million ways that he could have said it that he did not."

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin made the same argument as Rivera earlier Thursday, saying, the "money and media" line is "an anti-Semitic trope from a hundred years."

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