I've never met Ted Cruz, so I can't say as an absolute certainty that he's a psychopathic retard. But because he's a Republican and a Tea Partier, he can't honestly object to either characterization, since both are such a central part of his political base.
Republicans and Teapers get awfully pissy when I say things like that, but I'm hardly the one that's been in the trenches finding new and ever more self-defeating ways to turn superstition and stupidity into conservative virtues.
Even before the advent of the Tea Party, supposedly conservative politicians have equated self-promoting ignorance as folksiness, which explains the non-sexual appeal of Sarah Palin perfectly. Christ, when I try to explain to reasonable, intelligent people why I hold conservative positions, I have to bend over backwards to demonstrate that I'm not a fucking yahoo. And that's exhausting because people like Ted Cruz have made it their life's mission to make it exhausting.
I'm going to explain the antics of the junior senator from Neverland this week as succinctly as I can.
Cruz filibustered for 21 hours - reading Dr. Suess and comparing everyone that isn't him to the goddamned Nazis - on a day when there weren't any bills pending in the Senate, which makes it less of a filibuster and more a spectacular at of public masturbation. By the way, he did this on a measure that he said that he supported and ultimately wound up voting for. It was the single most bizarre spectacle I've witnessed in my 35 years of studying American politics.
Cruz has so entranced the stupid that Erick Erikson hasn't been able to get his head out of Ted's lap long enough to write a coherent blog post in over a month. He's made Mark Levin even more insufferably Mark Levin.
But people with normal cognitive functions - including most rational Republicans - have come to loathe Cruz with the power of a thousand suns. Jon Dickerson of Slate explains why;
He wasted precious time: Republicans don’t want to get the blame for a government shutdown. By soaking up valuable Senate time with no-win maneuvers, Cruz has left House leaders with less time to follow their legislative strategy—one that might have won limited concessions from White House. Or, with significantly more time, House Speaker Boehner might have been able to produce a funding bill that would have at least included a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act. That would have put Democrats up for re-election in vulnerable states in a tough spot; at the very least, red state Democrats would have had to take an unpopular vote. Now the GOP looks fractured, time is short, and Boehner may only be able to pass the funding bill passed by the Senate Democrats—which he’ll almost certainly have to do with Democratic votes, offering even more leverage to the enemy.Ego: He has used his colleagues to elevate himself in the furtherance of his 2016 presidential ambitions.He made Obama’s critique look accurate: For years, President Obama has said a minority faction of zealots controls the Republican Party. By hijacking the system for a cause that had no chance of success, Cruz confirmed Obama’s cartoonish vision of a party controlled by a wing unconcerned about practical results.He turned a tactical fight into a purity test: The majority of Republican senators agreed with Cruz on the importance of defunding Obamacare, but they disagreed with him on tactics. He characterized those with whom he had a tactical disagreement as ideological turncoats.He blunted the GOP’s best plan of attack on Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act was falling under its own weight as stories of rickety implementation, layoffs, and companies dropping coverage of their employees continued to be published. By linking the “defunding effort” to continued funding of the government, Cruz distracted the public from Obamacare’s inherent problems. That distraction undermined Republican efforts to chip away at the legislation through smaller attacks, like a one-year delay that might have led to a full repeal if the GOP took back control of the Senate in 2014.
Let's try to look at this dispassionately, shall we? Cruz took something really unpopular (Obamacare) and attached it to something even more unpopular (a government shutdown.) The GOP is on the record as being against the former, but they know that they can be seen as favouring the latter.
This ain't 1995, teenagers. When Newt Gingrich convinced his party to commit ritualistic suicide back then, there were continuing resolutions to fund all but the most trivial parts of the government. America wasn't at war with three-quarters of the world and threatening to bomb the rest. And nobody was crazy enough to threaten to not raise the debt ceiling and destroy what's left of the world economy. Bill Clinton wasn't afraid of a government shutdown. Shit, he used it as a opportunity to get suck-started by the unpaid help.
The ramifications are so much worse now than they were then, and Senator Cruz and his shithead brigades couldn't care less. "We can let it burn now or later," is one refrain I've heard a lot from supposed "patriots" and "conservatives." These people are actually willing - no, eager - to drive their own interest rates through the fucking roof just to score points in some idiotic ideological beauty pageant. They honestly believe that the ruination of the full faith and credit of the United States is a credible electoral path. And shitheels like Erickson say that if Obama doesn't want a shutdown, he should just give the Tea Party everything they want, which would make him a fantastic terrorist whisperer.
They aren't just assholes, They're out of their fucking minds.
But what did Cruz actually accomplish this week? Well, he wasted time that serious people could have used to make a deal. Oh, and he was on TV a lot.
Aside from that, not much. He actually wound up voting for the cloture motion that he was supposed to be (but actually wasn't) filibustering. Everything he wanted is going to be eviscerated in conference, but now it's going to happen with malice. Ted Cruz is singularly a man without friends in Washington. Good luck with having a career that way.
On the other hand, he's now the number one choice for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination among people without teeth or common sense. And you know what? I'm with them 100%!
Establishment tool Jonah Goldberg thinks it unfair to compare Cruz to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. I don't, because neither actually did anything to further their stated aims. McCarthy never actually named an actual communist and Cruz has done nothing in real terms in stopping Obamacare. McCarthy and Cruz are both third-rate demagogues who were just smart enough to know that they could only further their own careers by exciting mouthbreathers.
And that's exactly what the GOP needs in a presidential nominee this year. I wasn't so silent in wanting Sarah Palin to be the nominee last year, and I want Cruz for the same reasons.
There needs to be a Great Cleansing in a conservative movement, and that isn't going to come through the wingnuts forcing sane nominees to act like lunatics, as happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney. And Reagan wouldn't have passed the Tea Party's schizophrenic purity test. Neither would Barry Goldwater.
They want the first Bircher nominee, never mind that most of the country knew that was a horrible idea 65 years ago. Jesus, they've made Barack Obama - who would have fit well in Gerald Ford or George H.W Bush's Cabinets - into a Maoist Antichrist.
I'm suggesting that sensible conservatives give them exactly what they want and nominate Ted Cruz. The apocalypse will take care of the rest.
I figure that Boy Ted will lose about 39 states. In the last ten years, the GOP has seen Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida slip away. Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have all been tighter than they should be, and the demographics suggest that even Texas is going to start turning purple in the next decade.
I've spent three years trying to make a map where a Tea Partier wins the presidency, and I can't. In the last two cycles, those idiots have thrown away perfectly good Senate seats in Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri and (if it weren't for Linda Murkowski running as an Independent,) Alaska - all of which, except Delaware, used to be pretty reliable Republican states.
There's no reason to believe that a Tea Party presidential nominee will be any more successful than their Senate nominees were in Republican-leaning states.
The Republican Party doesn't have many more elections in them to lose until they become the Whigs. The GOP only survived FDR because they Eisenhower was willing to save them. But no one with the seriousness of purpose of Ike would ever carry the idiotic standard of the Tea Party. Who needs to throw away their dignity with their professional prospects?
The Tea Party needs to run, win or lose, on their own. They can't be allowed any excuses, such as being hindered by a "moderate", which hasn't actually happened yet, or a lack of institutional support, which they say they don't want.
In an ordinary time, I'd support someone like Chris Christie, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush (assuming that we could collectively forget who his brother is) - considered conservatives that can win - for president. Hell, I even like about half of what Rand Paul says, depending on my mood.
But I'm not. I'm tired of the Tea Party horseshit, and willing to give them their turn. Let them nominate a hack like Ted Cruz. It'll be fun to watch him struggle to win by 10 points in a cesspool like Mississippi, where the Republicans usually win by 25.
I don't want to see Cruz turned into Robert Taft, the serious conservative that wasn't given a chance. He needs to be Alf Landon, the guy who got beaten within an inch of his fucking life.
Then, and only then, does the Republican Party have a real chance of surviving the decade.
Besides, how bad could President Biden really be?
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