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We have all had the deep displeasure of having watched Teddy Cruz put on a real show this week. It’s been building for weeks, capped yesterday with his virtually one-man “filibuster” against the very bill he begged the House to pass.
Seemingly normal and intelligent people are scratching their heads.
What goes here?
Well, I think I know.
And I don’t stand alone in that conviction, plenty of other folks of a political bent think they do to. My offering simply fleshes out the skeleton of what many pundits have been saying for several days now.
Why try to force a fight against Obamacare when you cannot win it? For it could not be won, make no mistake about that. Nothing was going to force Harry Reid to putting up the House version of the budget bill. NOTHING.
And even if by some miracle, the Senate and House managed that feat–to pass a bill defunding the law, Obama would simply veto it.
Everyone knows this. It’s no mystery.
Worse, the bill itself (the defunding part) actually doesn’t do that, since the act is already funded now from the current budget, so all Cruz could ever have hoped for was to not fund the future. And as we have said, it simply couldn’t be done.
So Cruz pisses off the House and certainly Boehner who are forced to engage in another useless rounding of voting down Obamacare, all for Cruz to be unable to deliver ANYTHING in the Senate.
So what gives?
It has nothing to do with Obamacare, or any piece of legislation. The budget, simply because of it being the budget with a “shutdown” looming was the perfect target to attack Obamacare as the “object”. It could just as easily have been immigration, or any other measure favored by Democrats and not by Republicans.
It has nothing to do with what, but who. The who being Cruz. I repeat what professional pundits claim on this point. Cruz is going to run in 2016 for president. Making a grandstand play, getting tons of free publicity and appearing to be “the only Republican with guts” gives him national exposure, enables him to solicit funds (which he has through TV ads), and get a national list of supporters together.
In the not too distant future Cruz will be plying these folks to donate money “so that he can “finish the job” of dismantling Obamacare, and all other sorts of Tea Bagger favorites. He will also be looking for likely candidates to help run his campaign in all those primary states he needs to win in order to build the momentum that he expects will then make his candidacy inevitable.
One pundit reported that on a recent trip to Iowa, Cruz met with “the religious right” and “mesmerized them” with his rhetoric. These folks are so tired of being solicited for votes and then forgotten once in office (ala Dubya) that they are itching to put their full force behind a true believer.
Is it this crass? Does Cruz have really no interest in America and its wellbeing?
I would argue no, he really doesn’t.
There is a GQ article on this guy entitled The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas.
You should read the article, and you will find a man who is supremely arrogant and very very sure of himself. You can decide for yourself whether he actually believes any of the bilge he spouts or whether it has just become the convenient means to an end.
One can of course argue that Cruz is really not smart at all, and thus for some reason can’t see the end result of his Obamacare crusade. I don’t happen to be in that group. I think he is wildly intelligent. Certainly many can matriculate through even the ivied halls of Harvard and be none too smart–some people are undeniably talented at test taking. But Cruz went to Harvard Law, and that is a bit different.
Students are routinely (it’s all they do basically) given a set of facts and asked to deduce a legal principle. They are given new facts and asked to compare, analyze and conclude whether a stated principle of law does or does not apply. The decision by the student (who wins) is highly unimportant, but how you analyze the facts is. You can’t do this and be stupid, by and large. You might be a lightweight, but you can’t be utterly stupid.
And to believe that this plan would work is, as we have stated, plainly stupid.
But Cruz pressed forward with fervor and a zeal born of a true-believer. He announced that his goal was to convince his fellow Senators to join him in passing the House bill, and he claimed that it was possible to do that. Since it was not, what are we left with?
Rather than being stupid, Cruz is a bold and blatant liar. He has lied to the very base that he will depend upon. And this suggests that not only is his agenda purely personal, but also that he has a deep and abiding disrespect from the very people he claims to stand for. So stupid are the tea party followers, in his opinion, that they will forgive that he lied to them, and whipped them up only for the purpose of learning their names and addresses to add to his campaign lists.
Worse, he figures them too stupid to even figure it out. They will, he believes, conclude that he stood alone, against the machine of the “things as usual”, striking a pose as the only principled person in the Congress. And that will make then so electrified by him, that they will break their asses to assure his nomination victory come 2016.
Seriously, I think he believes this. Along with an unhealthy dose of narcissism that would make the average dictator blush in shame.
For a Cruz nomination would be a dream for the Democrats. The middle, which contrary to what some believe, aren’t this thoughtful, wait and see, study all the candidates and issues, group, won’t vote for him. They are essentially low-information voters who have to be induced to vote, and frankly the likes of a Ted Cruz scares them to death, the same way that Sarah scared them, and Mitt and Paul scared them. The way Christine O’Donnell scared then and Ted Akin. They ain’t goin’ for crazy.
Cruz, in the end is nothing more than the average monomaniacal who has no other goal in mind other than personal power. A fair reading of the GQ article makes it abundantly clear that his career has been on his mind since the time of Harvard law when he refused to study with any students who hadn’t undergraded at Harvard, Princeton or Yale. It’s what drove him to demand a transfer to a “harder” school in high school.
Whether he believes his own rhetoric is really of no real import. He will ride the shoulders of his followers, regardless, because all he really cares about is being the power.
We all would do well to know this man well. He is dangerous. He is utterly driven. He is arrogant. He is smart. And he wants to be President of the United States.
You have been warned.
PS: there was no filibuster. Reid allowed Cruz to talk until noon 9/24. And that’s when he stopped. After starting his talking binge with th words that “I will talk until I cannot stand any longer” which was a LIE.
Related articles
- Despite Cruz, Senate heads toward Obamacare vote (cnsnews.com)
- Cruz Talk-a-Thon Seen as Opportunism Lifts Obamacare Foes (bloomberg.com)
- Joe Peyronnin: Clipping the Wings of Cruz (huffingtonpost.com)
- Reid: There will be no filibuster (politico.com)
Existential Ennui 
Ah. Thank you. Yes, I had wondered about the possibility of gaining media attention, but the rest, as I said yesterday, both my husband and myself were asking, “WHY?!?”
We both shared this post, and I hope at least a few of our right-minded friends have a look.
The right-minded are unfortunately not able to separate their minds from the inconsistencies in their own head. They routinely block out any truth in anything that goes against the meme in their heads. But thanks! I appreciate the dissemination. 🙂 !END
aw gees… don’t be so hard on Tedhe just wants to be like Sarah Palin….and since he can’t GROW boobs….he decided to be one.
Well put as always Jimm!!END
Well said and I agree. It’s all about Ted, and his desire to Cruz into the white house come 2016. Good luck Teddy-boy. My bet is you’ll implode well before then.
Yeah, the great unwashed middle is still utterly unaware of him, and will remain so for a good while yet. They will turn away in horror for they are basically decent folks with very little interest in politics…but they don’t like crazy, and Ted is a megalomaniac. !END
God help us! Do we ever get past all this madness?
I guess we will be finding that out. I sure hope so.
He’s the kind of candidate who scares me the most because of his megalomania. He doesn’t want to be President; he wants to be Supreme Emperor of the U.S. He might be brilliant, yes, but he’s also deranged. You say he’s not crazy. But I think we’ve seen lots of crazy running for the POTUS in the past year. A lot of these candidates are narcissists and pathological liars. As far as Cruz, he’s so full of his own importance, value and superiority that compromise would be impossible. Of course, he’ll tank – there is no way the Republican machine would allow that lunatic to take over. If the Tea Party folks had any credible ideas to put forward, they’d have far more success at being heard if they’d just choose better spokespersons.
Oh he probably is crazy as a loon, but he’s smart too. That makes him very dangerous. He’s calculating that if he can incite the teabirchers sufficiently, they and they alone will push him to the nomination, where by sheer force of charisma, he will bedazzle the people of America. Someone said that when fascism came to America, it would come wrapped in a flag and spouting the constitution. That would be Ted Cruz in my opinion. The best thing the GOP can do at this point, is divorce themselves from the teabirchers. It’s an inevitable split, might as well be now. !END
Ah Sherry, we’ve met this guy before, haven’t we. He has some ignominious political ancestors and like them, our Ted is a very dangerous man. How dangerous will depend entirely on how long it takes him to burn out. He’s already gaining the loyalty of the Palin wing . . . his ambitions are obviously national. And enormous. Dangerous, confident, cynical, smart – he’s the type who thinks he’s surrounded by fools.
But he will burn out. Let us hope he doesn’t take too long going about it.
I certainly hope you are right Mo. He is exactly as you say. !END
Now that the anti-science, superstition-based initiative presidency is over, we need Manhattan projects to boost us out of this Grotesque Depression. First we must provide free advertising-based wimax wireless internet to everyone to end land line monopolies. Renationalize the telephone companies like 1917 and the DTV fiasco and internet under a renationalized post office. It’s not enough to make Boston-NY-Washington high spped, we need to connect the Boston end to Pittsburg, Chicago and Minneapolis and the Washington end to Charlotte, Birmingham and Texas. Because bovine flatulence is the major source of greenhouse gases, we must develop home growable microbes to provide all of our protein. We must finally join the metric system and take advantage of DTV problems to create a unified global standard for television and cellular instead of this Anglo Saxon competitive waste. We must address that most illness starts from behavior, especially parents. Since paranoid schizophrenia is the cause of racism, bigotry, homelessness, terrorism, ignorance, exploitation and criminality, we must provide put the appropriate medications, like lithium, in the water supply and require dangerous wingnuts who refuse free mental health care to be implanted with drug release devices. Churches should be licensed to reduce supersition and all clergy dealing with small children should be psychiatrically monitored to prevent molesting. We need to psychiatrically regulate the preachers and teachers that produce these creatures. Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh were the ultimate superstition based initiatives. Folks wouldn’t have to go to bigoted superstitious gatherings like churches if labor unions had more family dances, afterschool activities and even owned sports teams to build loyalty! Aborting future terrorists and sterilizing their parents is the most effective homeland security. Pregnancy is a shelfish, environmentally desturctive act and must be punished, not rewarded with benefits, preference and leave. Widen navigation straits (Gibraltar, Suez, Malacca, Danube, Panama, Hellspont) with deep nukes to prevent war. To fund this we must nationalize the entire financial, electrical and transportation system and extinguish the silly feudal notion that each industry should be regulated by its peers. Technology mandates a transformation of tax subsidies from feudal forecloseable debt to risk sharing equity. Real estate and insurance, the engines of feudalism, must be brought under the Federal Reserve so we may replace all buildings with hazardous materials to provide public works. Collectors, bounty hunters and private investigators are mercenaries operating on the edge of the law. Insects, flooding and fire spread asbestos, lead and mold which prematurely disables the disadvantaged. Disposable manufactured housing assures children are not prematurely disabled and disadvantaged. The only reason one engages in atomistic, shelfish small business is to avoid rules. Even Milton Friedman showed that small business creating jobs is unprovable because of survival bias (J Eco Lit, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 2129-2132). In today’s complex New Industrial State (J K Galbraith), you do a better job if you are a large contractor because you have all kinds of compliance controls in place and superior information than if you are on you own. Because feudalism is the threat to progress everywhere, we must abolish large land holdings by farmers, foresters or religions and instead make all such large landholding part of the forest service so our trees may diminish greenhouse gases. We must abolish this exploitative idea of trade and monopoly and make every manufactured disposable cottage self sufficient through the microbes we invent.
you certainly give us all a lot to think about. 🙂 !END