I made it through the entire Cruz speech without daydrinking so I feel pretty fucking confident about my prospects for longterm sobriety.
This man may actually be dumber than Sarah Palin.
This post is in: Clown Shoes
I made it through the entire Cruz speech without daydrinking so I feel pretty fucking confident about my prospects for longterm sobriety.
This man may actually be dumber than Sarah Palin.
Comments are closed.
Josie
But, but everyone keeps saying how brilliant he is.
kindness
My wish is that Cruz will name Palin VP candidate, win their primary and run while both of them sport Hitler mustaches the whole time. What could go wrong?
dmsilev
(posted this in the bottom of the last thread, but actually on-topic here)
Apparently Ted Cruz’s team doesn’t quite fully understand this whole Intertubes thingy. Firstly, TedCruz.com is, shall we say, just a tad off-message. Also, via Vox, there’s this:
Secret liberal mole trying to make Ted Cruz look (more) ridiculous?
dmsilev
@kindness: There’s a graphic floating around with the caption “Cruz/Palin 2016. Brought to you by the Hillary Clinton for President campaign”.
Mike R
Congratulations, didn’t drink but couldn’t watch but a few seconds and went out and threw hay to the horses. What a smarmy asshole that man is.
BigHank53
Ted Cruz is, in fact, really smart. But he also believes a bunch of really crazy things like the inerrancy of the Bible. So there’s a whole of lot of the world that’s got a giant mental electric fence around it: he doesn’t allow himself to think about those things. Which is fine if you want to be a nutbar preacher preaching to nutbars. Not so much with the nuclear launch codes.
Xboxershorts
He isn’t dumb. Not by a long shot. And knowing that, he should make your skin crawl…he truly believes the shit that spews from his pie hole.
BGinCHI
Did he pass a giant hat with dollar signs on the side?
Can politics in this country get more corrupt and insane?
I’ll take my answer off the air.
NotMax
Oy vey.
Time to explore Masochists Anonymous.
Splitting Image
Ted Cruz has a face only a mother could punch.
Anyone else would use a crowbar.
beer time somewhere
On behalf of my fellow citizens residing north of the 49th,
we don’t want that asswipe back.
jonas
Josh Marshall over at TPM has the definitive run-down on what Ted Cruz is really like, based on interviews with people who went to Princeton and Harvard with him. Josh says the consensus was that Cruz is an AASS — Asshole, Arrogant, Super Smart.
What Ted knows is that the people he hopes to get to vote for him, particularly in the primary, are extremely stupid, and that if he sounds like Sarah Palin after she’d chewed on lead paint chips for a few years, this “connects” with those kinds of voters: “Something, something, guns, Jesus, something, media, something, y’all.” (wait for applause)
The other great thing about this candidacy is that we’ll get to know Ted’s dad, a fundamentalist preacher so off his rocker, he makes Pat Robertson look like Rowan Williams. Good times.
Howard Beale IV
When the Anti-Christ appears, he will come wrapped in the American Flag….
TaMara (BHF)
Thanks, you started my Monday off with a laugh.
Just turned the little injured stray cat over to animal control. I love our animal control lady. She loves her job and is so good at it.
boatboy_srq
Palin never struck me as “dumb” anywhere near so much as “inarticulate.” She definitely understands grift to a level not often seen: she’s done a remarkably good job fleecing the rubes for a very long time – at least as long or longer than anyone who doesn’t run a megachurch. Cruz, of course, is directly affiliated with the FundiEvangelical
business enterprisesphere, so it’s to be expected that he’ll know how that scheme works.Mike in NC
@Josie: Per MSNBC — before I switched it off — Rafael is one of the most brilliant lawyers ever to grace the halls of Harvard!
DCrefugee
@Mike R:
This.
Cervantes
@jonas:
Yikes.
That takes … doing.
Belafon
Ted’s biggest failing in this attempt is that he thinks that his being elected in Texas shows he can win. What he fails to realize is that he stuck an R at the end of his name, and that was all it took here. He could say and do all sorts of things and it would not matter.
boatboy_srq
@jonas: Cruz strikes me as the kind of discipline-specific-brilliant but real-world-thickheaded type: high-functioning in his field but not so capable in real world scenarios that require common sense. Doesn’t make him any less scary, just makes him less impossible to understand.
Brutusettu
@BigHank53:
He actually believes in the inerrancy of “the” bible?
Is he one of the Southern Baptist that is KJV only??? i.e. the kind of SB that thinks learning Greek or Hebrew to understand “the” bible is for schmucks?
Brendan in NC
John – I’m less worried about the drinking than the concussions from repeated smacking yourself in the forehead, or banging your head on the furniture in frustration.
boatboy_srq
@jonas: Interesting that the biggest GOTea noises this year come with parental baggage, no? Paul, and now Cruz.
Tripod
Both Cruz and Walker are rocking that Nixonian look.
Bobby B.
If you watch Cruz sober you’re due for a stroke. He reminds me of R Crumb’s Oscar Meyer candidate: pasty, feckless evil.
Josie
@Tripod: When I was a kid, my mother had a small card with Nixon’s picture on it and the message, “Would you buy a used car from this man?” I can well imagine someone replacing Nixon’s picture with one of Cruz. The effect would be somewhat similar.
Brachiator
He is not dumb at all. He is simple, in the same way that Sarah Palin could only see simple answers to complex problems.
But Cruz reeks with the stink of McCarthyism, this time with a Tea Party spin. I don’t think he has a chance in hell to get the nomination, but he will help inspire and inflame the Tea Party absolutists.
Bex
To celebrate this day: https://youtu.be/zwDvF0NtgdU
Carl Nyberg
My assumption is that Ted Cruz is at least very cunning.
Further, I assume he doesn’t believe some of his BS. It’s just pablum to manipulate the rubes.
I’m reluctant to underestimate him.
The GOP has a strong tendency to nominate the guy who was #2 in the previous GOP presidential contest.
I can see Cruz war gaming a scenario where he is trying to be the top candidate who doesn’t get the nomination. He will then treat the GOP nominee similar to how Reagan treated Ford in 1976.
I see the following as being the more serious candidates:
* Scott Walker
* Mike Pence
* Rand Paul
* John Kasich
* Jeb Bush
One of them will get the nomination. And Ted Cruz will appear to publicly support the GOP nominee while hoping that he loses to Hillary Clinton.
Gordon, the Big Express Engine
@Howard Beale IV: Canadian flag?
Allen
No, no, no, to all of you saying he’s smart, no: Ted Cruz is the living embodiment of the difference between being educated—which he is—and being smart. And I have to agree with John here, he definitely is not that. It’s merely anecdotal, but someone who can severely misconstrue the meaning of “Green Eggs and Ham” has no business being considered smart.
raven
@Carl Nyberg: you and Mika.
gf120581
Dumb, no. Crazy, yes. This is what happens when you have a lunatic for a father who tells you you are “chosen”
EconWatcher
I think Cruz is too physically ugly to be elected president. To me, the guy looks like someone who would always have body odor.
They say the sweat on Nixon’s lip during the Kennedy debate may have cost him the election (radio listeners thought Nixon won the debate). Cruz has worse problems than that.
On the other hand, I don’t think Hillary’s much of a debater, and the debates with Obama were not a no-holds-barred affair.
Joey Maloney
@kindness: My wish is that Cruz will name Palin VP candidate
The McCarthy ticket: Joe and Charlie.
MattF
@Belafon: This is a good point. Texas Republicans are… legendary in their own minds, as the saying goes. I used to get a kick out of reading the Texas Republican platform, but after a while it got tiresome. It’s like, “OK, I see that you’re crazy. Now what?”
Villago Delenda Est
Check out tedcruz.com!
Gordon, the Big Express Engine
@Belafon: he hasn’t done a single thing for Texas since he was elected. I think he is smart enough to know he can’t win, so this is about his brand. He also could be angling for a veep slot. There are probably a lot of GOP money people who think that that a “moderate” like Jeb coupled with social con like Cruz is a winning formula.
Fred
When talking about what RWNJs believe I think it is important to qualify that as: what RWNJs “SAY” they believe. What I think they really believe is that they can say any crazy thing and so long as it is hateful to Obama, Libruls, Neeegrahs, Muzzlems, teh Gays, French people, etc. ad infinitum , The Base will eat it up. And that’s all that really matters with these guys. And the Grift of course.
And yes, I think Ted Cruz is very smart.
Germy Shoemangler
He was a champion debater in college (or so they tell me) so he may kick ass in the primary debates. He might fly high for a few months before Jeb’s team digs something up.
Also, it should be interesting when McCain goes on all the weekend morning talk shows and is asked his opinion of the cruz bird.
MattF
@Gordon, the Big Express Engine: I think Jeb!’s minders would veto that. And with good reason– Cruz has no loyalty to anyone but himself and has a history of demonstrating that.
Germy Shoemangler
@Gordon, the Big Express Engine: the teadrinkers think Jeb is too liberal, so he runs with cruz to establish his cred? We live in interesting times.
SatanicPanic
@EconWatcher: yes, this is the sad truth for him- no one is going to want to look at his weird, squishy face for four years.
Gex
@boatboy_srq: Interesting? Or predictable? That side of the aisle is riddled with daddy/manliness neuroses masquerading as policy points.
Origuy
Whois shows that tedcruz.com was created in 2004. I wonder how much the Cruz campaign offered the current owner.
TriassicSands
Once again a case of the intelligent-idiot. Cruz is, by some measures, extremely intelligent. Yet, he believes things that are utter nonsense and denies realities that only a cretin would deny. He’s a blood brother to intelligent-idiot Ben Carson. In that, neither of those two men is anything like Palin, who is a dumb-idiot. But even dumb-idiots can have characteristics that on some levels will make them very successful. And in Palin’s case, being physically attractive can get people to overlook other seemingly more important characteristics. The 2016 Republican nominee for president will almost certainly be an intelligent idiot, since all Republican candidates are today, by definition, idiots, and dumb idiots aren’t too popular after George W. Bush and Palin demonstrated the limitations of dumb idiots.And that should rule out Scott Walker.
Cervantes
@jonas:
He is intelligent and confident. He is driven; he thinks ahead in furtherance of his objectives. He does not understand circumspection in others. He can be — to me, pretty much is — insufferable, as he certainly was at Harvard after the 1994 mid-terms — not that he was a mensch before them, either.
Pogonip
What he’s doing works with his audience. I think of it as the Faux Intelligence Syndrome. Used to see it all the time. They’d have on an incredibly stupid guest, say Bill Crystal, that guy who’s always wrong. I’d say, “wow, he’s really stupid.”. Mom would say, “No, he’s a very intelligent man.”. “What did he say that was intelligent? Maybe I missed it.”. “Well, I like him and I think he’s intelligent.”. And this was before she was overtly senile. I think Rupert Murdoch has somehow found a way to hypnotize his audience, bypassing their common sense. However he does it, it mainly seems to work on people who have the TV on all the time as background noise. The ones like me who watch a specific program and then turn the TV off until next time seem immune. I suspect this is why the Fox debunkers don’t get converted; they’re paying close attention.
Now. Once a subject has trained himself to be hypnotized, the hypnotist can use a trigger word or action to send him into trance without going through the whole induction performance. I wonder if Cruz, and other conservative stars, have figured out, or have been given, that trigger?
Gordon, the Big Express Engine
@MattF: maybe not Cruz specifically but someone like him.
Germy Shoemangler
Will the GOP find something in Clinton’s emails that will end her campaign? Part of me thinks she’s too smart to have made a blunder like that, but then part of me thinks they can take something out of context, something she wrote in haste at 3am, and make her look unfit. And then she’ll be forced to apologize, the way she apologized for doing what Colin Powell did?
I wish the GOP would hold more debates. I love seeing these candidates poke at each other.
WaterGirl
@raven: And they shall be known by the company they keep.
hoodie
@Allen: A lot of people go to places like Princeton and Harvard to be educated and, thus, smarter; a lot go to engorge their egos and obtain tools toward that end. Cruz is the latter. I would say he’s neither educated nor smart, but simply very cunning, like Nixon. Cunning folks can do well in school because they are intensely focused on what gets them ahead, e.g., grades and other accolades. However, like Cruz, they often do not have respect for the substance of what they learn, as it is just a means to an end. Thus, Cruz can spout nonsense when he should know better. The smartest people I knew in college could give two shits about grades or accolades. If they got good grades, it was because they loved the subject matter.
Gordon, the Big Express Engine
@Villago Delenda Est: I tip my hat to whomever is behind that. Magnificent bastards!
Elly
@boatboy_srq: This.
Cruz reminds me a lot of a similarly “smart” graduate student in my former lab group who ended up being a thorn in the sides of practically all who encountered him, largely because he was “book smart,” and his brilliance at memorizing facts and taking tests completely obscured (at least, to outsiders) his absolute inability to make practical use of what he “knew.” He couldn’t design an experiment to free himself from a wet paper bag: among other things, he treated controls as if they were some pesky, methodological irritation that got in the way of making great discoveries. Basically, he was blinded by his own star; which made it impossible to learn from his own mistakes – especially when they were pointed out by the “lesser” (yet somehow more productive) lights around him.
Chris
@Carl Nyberg:
I don’t think he’s smart, but I also don’t think he has to be to win elections. At least 45% of the country would vote for Jar Jar Binks if he had an R after his name, and another 10% are fickle as hell.
WaterGirl
All this talk about Cruz – is he smart or is he not – makes me grateful for the millionth time for Barack Obama, who is smart in every possible way. He’s book smart. he’s brilliant, he’s educated. He’s a complex thinker. He’s street smart. He’s emotionally smart.
He has it all, and they hate him for it.
Brother Dingaling
@Carl Nyberg:
It will be Bush or Walker. And I think Walker will crash and burn. I don’t know exactly how yet, but he has that brittle stink about him.
I never understood how people spent so much time believing all those fools in the Republican primary had a chance against Romney last time. The gang is moderately less unelectable this time, but they are all so flawed…
The thing to do right now is just start fucking with Bush and Walker. If any one of the rest is the nominee, it’s smoooooooth sailing
Gex
@Pogonip: back in the early days of tech, when Microsoft just started doing their certifications, I knew so many people who would cram the material, take the test, get certified then end up working in tech.
They all *knew* enough to sound like they understood the tech. But they didn’t. They could however talk to most the public about tech and sound like geniuses.
Sometimes a fancy suit and big words is enough to convince people who don’t know enough about a topic to evaluate an argument.
Cacti
Regardless of Ted’s purported smarts, the only elections he’s ever won are in a state that’s red as a baboon’s ass.
He’s not running for President of Texas.
Also his creepy factor is off the charts.
SatanicPanic
@WaterGirl: Presidents like him don’t come along too often, I’m really going to miss him when he steps down
trollhattan
Another aspect of a Teddy Boy run that delights me is his very own personal Jeremiah Wright, i.e., dear old daddy. Holy shit, the old coot is batshit and damn proud of it,
He’s available for damaging the “Cruz brand.” As to Teddy Boy, he’s sufficiently dangerous whether smart or dumb as dirt that I want him crushed, not just the presidential ambitions but also, too, out of the senate. He shouldn’t be allowed around decent people. Or the senate.
Shalimar
@boatboy_srq: She also showed an expertise for interpersonal politics when she was in Alaska, kissing the ass of everyone above her who could be useful to her career and then abandoning them as soon as she was above their level. This hasn’t been evident in national politics because everyone from McCain’s campaign advisors onwards sees her as a country rube who isn’t smart enough to play on their level, but I’m sure that personal narcissistic charm is still there behind the scenes when she wants to use it.
jonas
Cruz’s candidacy is up there with Donald Trump’s — it’s just a vanity project. Like most other things in Ted Cruz’s life. He *has* to know that he has no shot at the money game, nor the nomination. The Bushes own Texas, and what the Bushes don’t already have locked up, Rick Perry has. There is the Florida Cuban community, but I’m sure any big names down there are backing Rubio and in any case, they’re not the kind of high rollers you find in Texas or on Wall Street.
I’m sure Jeb Bush is loving this, because Cruz is easily the most conservative Republican now running and when he goes down in some clusterfuck of gaffes in which he praises Hitler for “at least lowering taxes for working-class Germans” or calls for the repeal of lynching laws, Jeb can step forward as the moderate grownup the GOP can rally behind to defeat Hillary.
Cervantes
@Gordon, the Big Express Engine:
It’s a different but real Ted Cruz, a lawyer in Arizona who has owned and operated tedcruz.com for a number of years (since before Rafael emerged). He is a Democrat and seems … unlikely to make an endorsement today.
JPL
@Brother Dingaling: What if it isn’t smooth sailing? The thought of a Cruz presidency scares me.
Besides god, liberty and constitution, what else did he say?
Patricia Kayden
@Josie: Who is everyone? Nobody I know thinks he’s intelligent. And I bet many Rightwingers know he has zero chance of winning a general election. They can’t all be that dumb.
aimai
@Allen: Not to get too deep in the weeds but a truly educated person is one who can learn–can learn from experience, from their teachers, from books, from other people. That person can change from the person they were at the start of a class or an experience. In other words they are not just “smart” in some way, or cunning, or able to dominate other people socially or intellectually they are able to be open to correction, to change, to novel information.
People like Cruz are closed to those kinds of novel experiences, to new information, to changing their opinions or their attitudes as new facts are presented. They can be very “smart” in the sense that they can go to class, assimilate information, ace tests, do well in debate but they can never truly grow as people because everything is slotted into a position that pre-exists the experience or the class. I have no doubt that Cruz sat through many classes at Harvard that challenged his world view–and he may even have done well in terms of grades–but he didn’t really learn anything since he never was open enough to grasp that his world view and the facts he believes are true are, in fact, false.
Amir Khalid
@Pogonip:
Kristol, I think you mean.
rikyrah
still waiting for people to explain how RAFAEL, the CANADIAN Citizen, is running for President of the United States.
raven
@Cervantes: Little message on the last post.
Patricia Kayden
@jonas: I think it’s going to be Scott Walker. For some reason, the media appears to like him. Wouldn’t be surprised if it comes down to Walker v. Clinton.
Cervantes
@raven:
Yes, thanks, and you know where I stand on that disgraceful war.
PS: Sy was, and remains, a national treasure.
Belafon
@Germy Shoemangler: A Daily Kos cartoon had Republicans going after her for not responding to an email from a Nigerian prince wanting to stash his money in the US.
Germy Shoemangler
@Belafon: Well, they’re going to pick through every word she ever sent, publicly and privately. And if they find something even remotely questionable, they’ll misquote it or take it out of context. O’Malley vs. Bush?
Brachiator
@jonas:
The TPM piece is an odd, and oddly pointless piece. Marshall admits that he did not know Cruz at all, and actually admits that he spent most of his own “sophomore year in kind of a fog,” which makes you wonder whose asses he kissed to get ahead. So we get a lot of second hand comments on Cruz’ arrogance, which I suppose we must also assume persists today. All of which is to simply confirm a pre-existing belief that Cruz is an asshole whose only appeal is to the stupid, and who good liberals can safely dismiss as beneath them.
None of this speaks to Cruz’s oily appeal, his ambitions or his effectiveness as a leader of the Tea Party Goon Squad.
I don’t think Cruz has a chance in hell of getting the nomination. But if the GOP wins the white house, I see Cruz being nominated for Attorney General and later being pushed forward as a Supreme Court Justice.
R. Johnston
Ted Cruz strikes me as one of those people who gets mistaken for being smart because he has a great memory for details and is highly charismatic, albeit in a way that comes off as “asshole” to people who don’t find him persuasive. I’m going to guess from his educational background that he’s also a pretty good writer of a sort, but being a good writer of legal exam essays does not require particularly strong analytic capabilities, even at Harvard Law; regurgitating facts and vocabulary in a well structured format with a dose of flowery opinion thrown in is definitely one path to success at a high level law school.
You can get really far in life with charisma and a memory for details without ever being able to reason your way out of a wet paper bag, and there’s a whole lot about Ted Cruz that suggests that his actual analytic capability is not all that great.
max
@Carl Nyberg: I see the following as being the more serious candidates:
* Scott Walker
* Mike Pence* Rand Paul* John Kasich* Jeb Bush
Fixed. Although there’s a decent argument for striking Scott Walker.
max
[‘John Kasich? Really?’]
Germy Shoemangler
I remember when Pat Schroeder dropped out of her presidential race in tears. She would have been a great president. And it was around that time that I heard Abbie Hoffman on a radio show, suggesting that she was blackmailed by the GOP into dropping out. I know Abbie had some… fanciful notions, but he said he was repeating what he’d been told “off the record”
I’m not counting unhatched chickens. I’m bracing myself for an ugly 2016 result. If anyone can reassure me, I welcome your ideas.
Cervantes
@R. Johnston:
Wait — you’re saying that Cruz is “highly charismatic”?
In what room? At Princeton and Harvard Law? In Texas? In the country as a whole? Where and in what sense is he “highly charismatic”?
canuckistani
What was it they said about Newt Gingrich? “He is a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like”?
Josie
@Germy Shoemangler: You are correct in that it will probably be very ugly. If anyone, however, can understand how vicious the GOP is and can withstand their attacks, it would be Hillary Clinton. She has been through some of the worst they could come up with and is still moving forward.
dww44
@BigHank53: In a nutshell, the problem with Ted Cruz. But we’d be idiots to dismiss him as dumb, which he is definitely not.
Tractarian
And fortunately for the human race, he has about the same chance of ending up in the Oval Office.
I don’t know. It seems to me that you can graduate summa cum laude from Harvard Law, ace the bar exam, and become president of Mensa and still be “dumb” by any reasonable definition if you profess to believe that the Earth is 6,000 years old, etc.
Academic achievement is good, don’t get me wrong, but it’s neither necessary nor sufficient to have that in order to be “Super Smart”.
catclub
@Mike in NC:
One of the funny bits on the TPM AASS article. Cruz distinguished himself at harvard law as a particularly big asshole.
Also, was he there the same time Obama was? Or just close?
Cervantes
@catclub:
He arrived just as Obama was leaving. No overlap.
The Moar You Know
Of course he’s smart. You don’t think he’s in this to win it, do you? Hell no. There’s a lot of social con money on the table, money the Bushes and Walkers don’t need and don’t want, pretty pretty money, just lying there for God’s sake, saying “take me, take me and lie to me and tell me how good I am and how BAD everyone else is and then tell me they’re all going to die for being dirty dirty sinners cause that’s when I get off so fucking hard”.
The man knows his audience and his audience are a bunch of suckers with checkbooks who are just waiting for him to start throwing the red meat. And he is so good at that.
This is not a campaign, folks. It’s the start of a beautiful grift.
Tractarian
By the way, it is virtually certain that the GOP nominee will be either Bush or Walker.
I wouldn’t waste time on any of the other dolts. (Unless it’s to pump them up in hopes of a more bruising primary season)
pseudonymous in nc
@jonas:
If you take TPM’s reporting at its word, he managed to piss off most of the Senate GOP caucus within a couple of months of arriving, and has only a few devotees. The Senate is a distraction for him: he can use committee hearings as a platform, but the dirty work of legislating offers no interest. Announcing this early gives him ample time to do less boooooring things that feed his ego.
delk
I only saw a small part of it. Did he ever jump on the drum set he was standing in front of to bust out a Neal Peart solo?
p.a.
Cruz:Harvard. Jindal:Brown. Support your local public university.
The Moar You Know
@rikyrah: What part of him being white and wearing a very expensive suit don’t you understand?
It’s a good thing I like crickets because that’s all you’ll hear from the tricorner hat brigade this time around.
WereBear
We also have to remember Ted’s audiences thus far.
{crickets}
Yeah. He’s smart enough to make them feel a tingle, but normal people are repulsed. I haven’t had a visceral instant dislike happen this fast since Martha Stewart.
And maybe he is smart, but there are many kinds, and Ted, bottom line, is about Ted. He either gets his way, or does his best to spoil it for everyone.
Ted Cruz is a spoiler. That’s my ray of light.
The Thin Black Duke
Problem is, Teddy is smart enough to understand what his audience wants to hear, and what his audience wants is a man would have no problem at all of doing the dirty work of getting rid of those things (niggers, dykes, faggots, cripples) that his audience hates. Hell, that’s 47% of the voters right there, y’know?
pseudonymous in nc
@The Moar You Know:
I’m not even sure about that. He and his Goldman Sachs VP wife are already fucking loaded. Perhaps it’ll be nice to have the campaign pay for the private jets and hotel suites and gourmet dining while he’s slumming on a Senate salary, but that’s just a bonus on top of being able to give lots of speeches in front of adoring crowds.
(My bet is that he’s not going to be doing much retail gladhanding politics in Iowa and NH.)
Cervantes
@p.a.:
More accurate:
Cruz : Princeton, Harvard :: Jindal : Brown, Oxford
Good idea in any event.
Capri
@Patricia Kayden: Meanwhile, plenty of folks on the left think Warren is a shoe-in. It’s called bias.
Brachiator
@The Moar You Know:
Cruz is passing, or maybe gets extra whiteness from his mother. His father is from Matanzas, known for its Afro Cuban folklore. The roots run deep there.
It’s also fun to know that his father fought for Castro, before “learning” that Fidel was a communist. A different path, but it’s funny how the Cruz family’s “anti-colonial” roots go deeper than Obama’s supposed hatred for the white ruling elite, uh, I mean, all things American or whatever BS the GOP is pushing this week.
The Golux
Look up “backpfeifengesicht” in a German dictionary, and there is a picture of Ted Cruz alongside the definition.
WereBear
Yes, they are. But it’s always a matter of perspective.
I’m sure when Karl Rove was riding high he felt rich… until he hung out with the Bushes and they made clear he was a hired hand and always would be.
To me, Cruz & Co are raking it in. But in their circles, they could feel like poor relations. They probably want potentate rich. And for that, you don’t even have a job.
feebog
Love this argument about whether Cruz is smart or dumb. Look, you have to have a certain level of intelligence to get through college and a top tier law school. The real question is if he has the analytical skills to think things through to a solution. If you consider Obama, the answer is obvious, he has both intelligence and analytical skills. Cruz lacks the latter. He has always lived in a bubble, and his real life experience is limited to that bubble. Add to that a massive ego that constantly needs feeding and reinforcing, and you get a smarmy asshole who thinks he has all the answers, but completely misunderstands the questions. Look at his recent performance before the convention of Fire Fighters, wherein he completely bombed with his stock stump speech. A basic consideration of your audience would normally lead to changing the message somewhat so that it was palatable to those hearing it. Instead, he just ran the usual BS up the flagpole and ended up looking like a fool.
JMG
Nothing would louse up Cruz’s career faster than another Republican winning in 2016, so this campaign is aimed at making sure that doesn’t happen. He will take stands the other GOP candidates will either have to endorse or denounce, and they will be screwed either way, be it in the general election or primaries.
mai naem mobile
I don’t think Cruz is dumb but I just don’t think he has a high Q rating. He comes across as a Father Coughlin type but whod is going to turn off at least 40 percent of the population right off the bat. Also, I don’t think hes that attractive looking.He looks greasy.
Cervantes
@Brachiator:
Well, if I have my arithmetic right, his father was a young teen-ager at the time. It’s plausible and understandable to me that a boy of thirteen, say, would join a campaign against a vile and hated dictator without appreciating its philosophical underpinnings, such as they were — or without even asking or being told what they were, or without even knowing what was meant by “Communism” to begin with.
Cervantes
@JMG:
As I said, he does try to think ahead.
Tripod
The Bushies will rat fuck anyone that gets in the way of JEB’s coronation.
muddy
@mai naem mobile: It’s hard to draw a cartoon of him because he already looks like a caricature drawing.
Tripod
@Cervantes:
Clearly he’s a red diaper baby and socialist Manchurian candidate.
samiam
Buh…but he went to Harvard. Unlike the current prez…oh wait a minute…buh he’s a true American citizen unlike that Hawaii born guy who is probably from Kenya…That Canadian citizenship thing is just a libruuul rumor by the lame stream media.
Tom
I’ve been thinking lately about this idea that conservative politicians/pundits/etc. are ‘dumb’ and I have a problem with it.
For one thing, it waters down the term, much like ‘evil’ is just a pale shadow of what it once meant.
For another, it’s easy for opponents to counter because they just have to say something like, “but they graduated from Harvard!”
I think a better way to consider conservatives is in terms of maturity. I like to say that modern conservatives are emotionally twelve-year-old boys. They think they know everything, they’re completely self-involved and their relationship with other people is in terms of what’s in it for themselves.
Brachiator
@Cervantes:
True enough. On the other hand, Cruz father was 14 when he fought for Fidel, and had already suffered beatings and imprisonment for opposing the old regime. Hard choices at an early age brings all kinds of understanding.
danielx
The depths of Palin stupidity, unlike the Marianas Trench, have yet to be plumbed.
Elie
@feebog:
I believe that Cruzs’ intelligence may be hampered by a personality disorder that distorts his thinking. This is not uncommon in life. He is very self centered and seems lacking in empathy. That results in errors in assessing what policy options work or don’t work and the impact on people. His father is pretty narcissistic as well. They get an idea in their head and embroider it to their satisfaction without considering others. This results in cockamamie theories but he is undeterred because of his core narcissism that holds that he can do no wrong. A lot of our educational system is about memorizing facts and accepted dogma. He is just fine with that. Where he and others like Bobby Jindal get lost is in making their ideas appealing and acceptable by others. They don’t have that kind of empathy or ability to see downstream ramifications of their ideas in anything but their way.
muddy
@Tripod: The proof is in his logo.
Tom
@Patricia Kayden: I agree, but more because the Kochs are investing so much money into the 2016 election and Walker is their top sock-puppet.
Lewis Thomason
The first clown in the car.
WereBear
I’ll go one step further. He doesn’t care.
None of them do. They are excuses to cut taxes on rich people and regulations on business. PERIOD.
So smarts one way or the other means absolutely nothing. They are looking for another Reagan, and whatever tricks they can pull.
Frankensteinbeck
@boatboy_srq:
We do not live in a meritocracy. Does anyone here think we do? Succeeding is no indicator that you are intelligent. In Palin’s case, she is no smarter than a lottery winner. The skilled grifts have been set up by other people who are using her because she’s the moron with the right look. She has repeatedly threatened to destroy these grifts with her own venial, impatient incompetence – such as when she stole from a green room all the gifts that would have been given to her a few hours later. She was chosen and steered by other people. She has accomplished nothing on her own more impressive than being elected mayor of a moderate-sized city. That’s how tiny Alaska’s population is. And like a lot of grifters, she drinks the kool-aid and the farther she rises, the more she thinks she’s too good to think, work, or exercise self-control about anything.
@Brother Dingaling:
It had a lot to do with Romney himself being a pretty bad candidate. But the others were pure, incompetent clowns.
gene108
@BGinCHI:
Yes.
On the corruption scale, with a 1 being honest government and 10 being a totally corrupt government, I’d but the U.S. at a 3.5
You don’t need to bribe the guy at Motor Vehicles to get a driver’s license, or the building inspector to get a permit for renovations to your home and so on.
I think the bigger problem in the U.S. is that it is expensive to get elected to office, which creates an artificial barrier for the not-already-wealthy and an additional barrier for raising money to campaign.
Limiting the money a politician can spend campaigning would rein in a lot of the corruption in the country.
Hal
Being smart, as in having the ability to absorb and process information, to be quick thinking and knowledgeable in specific area or subjects like law or medicine doesn’t mean you are qualified to be the president. To me it’s about ideas and the effect they have on people’s lives. Ted Cruz is smart. Maybe brilliant in his ability to study and understand law, but that doesn’t make him presidential material.
Frankensteinbeck
@WereBear:
This is backwards. Conservative policies are excuses to hurt people (especially blacks). Conservatives are people who resent that they’re not allowed to bully others as much as they want. The rich just piggy-back on this, because allowing the rich to kick the poor generally meshes with allowing bigots to kick their favorite minority.
EriktheRed
He’s “dumber than Palin” like a fox.
Cruzey will be able to get much richer off this grift than Snowflake Snooki will with hers.
muddy
@EriktheRed: That’s fair enough, he’s willing to put the work in.
Ruckus
@Tom:
This is a better take on it than he’s stupid. But I think you are still giving him too much credit. I’d say 7 rather than 12. At 12 most are getting some impression of the real world around them. Cruz is still in his own little world. Yes he’s educated but as @aimai: effectively stated he has a wall around him that insulates him from the real world. That wall blocks reality so well that it rarely gets through. He lives in his own little world. He appears smart (highly educated) but has the analytical skills of a toad.
burnspbesq
Whether Cruz is smart or dumb seems to me to be rather beside the point.
He’s convinced several million likely voters that he’s the greatest thing since cold beer. That, all by itself, makes him dangerous.
burnspbesq
@gene108:
Wait a sec. I thought you were from Jersey.
Not Hudson County, apparently.
Aleta
About lack of thoughtful intelligence:
Bush was well-handled, stuck to the scripts. His lack of commitment to intelligence (both senses of the word, I guess) didn’t matter in his elections or his ‘achievements’ in changing so much, so fast.
Palin resisted her handlers, McCain campaign was disorganized, so she exposed herself way beyond the image they presented. (And even after going down in flames she has usefulness to the right wing.) I guess that drawing the attention of political bloggers away from other issues is power, regardless of intelligence.
Didn’t Cruz bring out that coloring book before 2008? I suppose it got his face into a lot of living rooms. I wonder what the actual sales to humans were. At the least, Cruz entering now will keep the party more inclusive of right wing Christians about to bail bc of Jeb’s moral lassitude.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
They can multitask evil. They can want lower taxes and want minorities (or anyone other than them) to suffer. That one gets them the other is just icing.
Iowa Old Lady
I repeat: Think third party, Ted! Third party!
Patricia Kayden
@Capri: I have friends who love Warren and want her to run but I keep pointing out to them that this country is not ready for someone so leftwing — at least not right now. Perhaps in a decade she can run but right now she would be such an easy target for the “liberal media”.
sparrow
@Tom: Totally agree. Asking whether they are “dumb” or not is the wrong question. Clearly, most of these people have a high degree of social intelligence, whether innate (natural social dominators) or learned (in the case of high-functioning sociopaths). They are also driven, and willpower and drive are more important in succeeding in school that native intelligence. But what they are is ruthless, emotionally stunted, immature, and closed-minded. A mirror image of the people they want to attract into voting for them. That’s where the problem lies.
mds
@trollhattan:
(1) Jeremiah Wright would have a long way to go to get anywhere near the extremist batshittery of Daddy Cruz. (2) Daddy Cruz is not going to face anything but the tiniest fraction of the scrutiny Jeremiah Wright was subjected to. After all, Jeremiah Wright was [CUE SPOOKY MUSIC] one of the pastors at the Obamas’ church, while Rafael Cruz is merely the candidate’s father, who raised his son to be the fucking Dominionist messiah. Hey, isn’t it about time to remake the Omen trilogy?
@Cervantes:
Excuse me, but did you just refer to valiant anticommunist and beloved US ally Fulgencio Batista as “a vile and hated dictator”? Why do you hate America?
Violet
@Patricia Kayden: Do all these people who want Warren to run have zero idea of how our government works? Having Elizabeth Warren as a strong voice in the Senate, a job she can probably keep as long as she wants, will allow her to have much more influence than if she ran for president. She’s great where she is and is doing a fabulous job. I’d much rather have ten more Senators like her than see her run for president.
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: When I was 10 if the boys kicked you, that meant they liked you. So I might have to go for 10 being the right age. On the other hand, by 12 those hormones might be kicking in, in which case the ability to think goes way down. So maybe 12 is the right number.
In any case, I agree that this framing is better than “smart” or “dumb”.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I don’t doubt Cruz’s intelligence or his legal skill, but I suspect he has a profound personality disorder. He has an oily creepiness that broadcasts (often in whispers) a vibe just this side of a serial killer. And I’m not easily creeped out.
Elie
@WereBear:
That was my point on the lack of empathy. They “jes don care”.
What is scary is that there seems to be a lot of people who agree with the lack of empathetic policy – even when they or their loved ones will suffer. THAT, I don’t get unless psychopathology is much more prevalent than I thought. Of course, tribal thinking (or groupthink), can be pretty pervasive and unexamined…
Just Some Fuckhead
Ted Cruz is a deeply stupid man.who is easily bamboozled by Ted Cruz into believing things that are not true.
Aleta
I guess his campaign comes down to how savvy his team is, and whether he is OK with letting others think for him. If he’s sincere about his moral platform, I think he’ll place that above using his intelligence (god before man) but if he’s a smart guy who’s been planning this since high school, gathering supporters since college, who knows.
Bobby Thomson
So to sum up the comments, Cruz isn’t a moron so long as you redefine what it means to be stupid. Awful lot of diploma humpers around here.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Bobby Thomson:
It’s seems important when you will spend the rest of your life paying for it.
Keith G
@Bobby Thomson: Help the humpers see the error of their ways by giving your definition of a moron.
boatboy_srq
@Bobby Thomson: Not exactly. Cruz is that special high-functioning moron that gets rewarded for having an aptitude for some specialized knowledge, typically by admission to and graduation from some respected higher learning institution. This is a not especially uncommon scenario: someone with a talent for a very precise discipline (particle physics, neurosurgery, chaos theory, Medieval English writers of soft pr0n) who has no idea how to function outside that discipline and no clue that s/he’s not as functional outside that discipline as s/he is in it. That doesn’t make for “moron” precisely, and doesn’t qualify for “diploma humping” so much as recognize that higher ed is geared to recognizing talent in fairly specific fields – and to conveniently ignoring that skills applicable to the real world are at least as important to survival outside acadaemia. Cruz benefits, in turn, for having his moronic side lauded by people who think that being a goof is somehow respectable; and from having learned just enough interpersonal skills to think that by verbally assaulting anyone with more real-world skills than he has, he’s actually winning the arguments (instead of causing his opponents to give up on him as a lost cause immune to reason).
Lurker
@EconWatcher:
Yes, Cruz is remarkably ugly, is he not? And batshit insane to boot! What a winning combination!
Chris
@Elly:
To me, the only really worthwhile test of how smart you are is whether you’re smart enough to know what you don’t know. And therefore, to listen to those who’ve made it these things their life’s work.
Pretty much the entire conservative movement fails the test on that standard alone.
Aleta
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): yeah, that too. They talk about the killer instinct for business success, and going in for the kill in sales, and from 2000-2009 we let killers and thieves run the White House and mostly Congress. The Houses are infested now. Hard to believe it can ever be repaired.
Bobby Thomson
@Tractarian: yeah, this.
Lavocat
Here’s the rich irony:
Obama has been pilloried for being born in Hawaii, w/ all sorts of questions about his birthplace and citizenship, to say the least.
Now comes McCarthy doppelganger Ted Cruz – A CANADIAN CITIZEN BY BIRTH – avowedly running for president.
There’s just this teensy-tiny problem and it’s found in Section 1, Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution: “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; …”.
So, to be clear, Barack Obama is the Kenyan Usurper, but, hey, it’s perfectly alright for Ted Cruz to run for president, despite it being EXPLICITLY PROHIBITED by the U.S. Constitution.
So, this is all just smoke & mirrors, obviously.
Then again, it’s only a matter of time before the fascists decide to pass the 28th Amendment explicitly rescinding this portion of Article 2, Section 1. They have both houses (and maybe a few blue dogs). How rich would that be: Obama vetoing the Republican attempt to circumvent the Constitution to install the kind of foreign born scum that they claim him to be. [And, yes, I realize it’s more complicated than this; this is just shorthand.]
Wait for it in 3, 2, 1, …
Bobby Thomson
@Keith G: not believing stupid things.
Bobby Thomson
@boatboy_srq: but see, you can’t give a concrete example of his brilliance other than those diplomas and I have yet to hear one.
ETA: stupid is as stupid does.
Cervantes
@Lavocat:
No.
Chris
@Cervantes:
True. The Cuban revolution was like the Iranian one (heck, like most revolutions) in that the people who supported it didn’t all have the same goals – they just agreed that whatever it was we should replace the Old Regime with, the Old Regime needs to go.
(IIRC Castro had to do a little house cleaning among his revolutionary brethren after taking over, precisely because there were quite a few supporters of the revolution who hadn’t signed up for a “Communism + Fidel Castro President For Life” vision of the future).
the Conster
Uh, his name isn’t even “Ted” for starters. Wait ’til the teatards wake up and figure out that their messiah’s name is actually Rafael and he was born in Canada.
Keith G
@Bobby Thomson: Right.
Tom
@Ruckus: Good point.
In “Carpe Jugulum”, Terry Pratchett explains the only sin in a conversation between Granny Weatherwax, a witch, and The Reverend Oats, a preacher:
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”
“But they Starts with thinking about people as things…”
This is how I view modern conservatism. It’s really about treating people as things.
Chris
@Tom:
I’m no philosophy expert, but I remember the proposition “always treat human beings as an ends in themselves and not as a means to an ends” (Kant, I think) and I remember thinking that it really wasn’t a bad starting point for one’s moral philosophy.
Cervantes
@the Conster:
At HLS, Cruz signed himself “R. Ted Cruz” at the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy and “Rafael E. Cruz” at the Harvard Latino Law Review.
Tree With Water
“Ted Cruz is the Abraham Lincoln of Sarah Palins”.
That’s a brilliant line, but hardly does justice to old Abe. Unlike what Kris Kristofferson said about his late pal Johnny Cash, whom he described as being, “Abe Lincoln with a wild side”.
Cervantes
@Chris:
Yes, it was Kant:
That’s his first formulation of his so-called “categorical imperative.”
Lurker
@Patricia Kayden:
And Clinton will wipe the floor with his sorry arse since Walker is abysmally ignorant about foreign policy.
pseudonymous in nc
@Lavocat:
Really, people are still doing this as more than just a joke against Birfers?
1. There’s zero-zilch-nada judicial precedent on that particular clause, and won’t be until someone with standing brings a successful suit. Good luck with that.
2. All other citizenship law and precedent assumes that if you’re not naturalized, you’re natural-born. It doesn’t really matter because there aren’t two classes of US citizenship except for presidential eligibility. But see 1.
Jeffro
@Cervantes: While I would love to see a reporter with the brass to ask him to explain the difference in the two signatures, and if it had anything to do with pandering to the audience, I won’t hold my breath.
Even if it were asked, he’d just say, “See, more drive-by media ‘gotcha’ journalism” and call for the next question.
shell
Glad somebody else noticed the Nixon-like resemblance.
God, please, something else happen in the news, it’s Ted Cruz all over the place today.
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
tell the truth!
Tree With Water
@shell: Nixon, hell. Google ‘Joe McCarthy, DNA, clones’, and compare photos.
Tree With Water
@pseudonymous in nc: You can’t keep a good beast down. Recall Hitler was Austrian, and look where he ended up.
Calouste
@Ruckus: 7 sounds about right. My theory is that the emotional development of wingnuts is completely halted by the shock they get the first time their mother tells them to tidy up their room or finish their broccoli. Which would be around 7 years old.
Brachiator
@the Conster:
You mean he’s a Ninja Turtle?
jackmac
@WaterGirl: I just turned 60 and have lived through 11 presidents. Barack Obama as the best of my lifetime. He’ll really be missed.
The Moar You Know
@gene108: I’d rate it higher, but that’s simply because the scams in America are far higher-dollar and kept that way to keep the peons from stealing from their lords.
I mainly replied to share an excellent anecdote about the driver’s license thing. For decades, Mexico has tried and failed to keep their DMV people from taking the bribe to get the driver’s license. Every attempt to stop the practice failed.
So Mexico took a drastic step, one that will have some serious ramifications for their (and our) future – they’ve gotten rid of driver’s licenses. Completely. At least in the DF (Mexico City). Don’t know if that’s a national thing yet, but suspect it is.
That is one way to solve the problem, if by “solve” you mean “burn down the government”.
Mike E
@feebog:
This is the usual “tell” for those who have no intention of governing. See: Bush,George W…that administration singlehandedly kept flagpole manufacturers in business.
Kenneth Fair
@boatboy_srq: You are precisely correct about Cruz; he is very, very smart but very, very unwise. Not to mention, a massively arrogant douchebag.
Howard Beale IV
Cruz is the classic example of Dunning-Kreuger effect in action.
Tree With Water
@jackmac: Even those who consider the president’s unwillingness to grab a torch and lead the mob against the banking class (for example) are properly grateful when they consider how much worse it might have been.. or could be.
Carl Nyberg
@max:
I’m just a guy with an Internet connection.
Here’s what the GOP establishment would like John Kasich to be:
* a candidate that can carry Ohio
* a candidate that will do what the GOP establishment wants
* a candidate who won’t bring legal trouble to table, unlike Perry & Christie
* a candidate who won’t bring Bush baggage to the table, like Jeb
* a candidate pragmatic enough to select a helpful VP candidate, like Rubio or Sandoval
Can Kasich win the GOP nomination? He’s got to be able to do better than Pawlenty, right?
But what if there was a sane, disciplined GOP sugar daddy billionaire who could negotiate the other billionaires into checking their egos…?
It does seem like a longshot.
Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey
@Cervantes: This. It was a nothingburger for Obama and McCain, and it’s a nothingburger for Cruz. I mean, it might be a fun bone to toss to the low-information RW rubes to cause a little mayhem, but it’s not an issue.
Carl Nyberg
@JMG:
Bingo!
Ted Cruz will rat fuck his way up.
And why shouldn’t he? What’s the GOP establishment done for him?
Another Holocene Human
@Josie: Extreme narcissism is often taken for brilliance in our culture.
brantl
This douchebag went to Hahvahd. I don’t think he’s stupid, I think he’s deliberately ignorant.
Another Holocene Human
@dmsilev: I like the one where Cruz and Palin have gone hunting and killed the elephant.
Carl Nyberg
@gene108:
My time in the peacekeeping mission in Cambodia showed me society can become much more corrupt and dysfunctional.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: Precisely. And being arrogant in politics is usually a big mistake. Just because you’re the “smartest” guy in the room (who cares, right? they have lobbyists for that) doesn’t mean he gets people. Or voters.
Turgidson
@jonas:
I dunno. If he lives up to his reputation, Tailgunner Ted might be clever enough in debates to corner the less-insane candidates into saying horrible, horrible things in pursuit of the nomination. I mean, Romney was on the stage with a bunch of dimwitted cranks and managed to get himself boxed into a raft of heinous statements and positions. Tailgunner Ted is even crazier than those lollygaggers, but more intelligent (in a raw brain power sense, at least). The format of the debates might prevent too much back and forth between candidates, but I could see Ted angling Jeb into agreeing with him about the threat of illegal immigrants who are building their own nuke in El Paso or something.
Rasputin's Evil Twin
@Tripod: I was thinking Joe McCarthy, myself.
Another Holocene Human
@Germy Shoemangler:
You know, if that’s their big plan, they’re really fucking up by doing this early in 2015.
JGabriel
@BigHank53:
OR: Cruz is smart enough to know it’s all bullshit, but manipulates the nutbars with what they want to hear – and with a flawless personal imitation of a nutbar – partly because he believes many of the same things, but mostly because he’s an authoritarian sociopath.
Germy Shoemangler
Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has said he suspected Mrs. Clinton has not turned over all the Benghazi-related emails, and has asked Mrs. Clinton to turn over her server to a neutral party to examine all of her emails, including ones she deleted, to determine if others should be provided to his panel.
I would like all GOP candidates to turn over their servers for immediate examination of ALL of their emails.
Scorched earth.
Turgidson
@max:
Why isn’t Kasich a serious candidate? Kasich is by miles the strongest candidate they have on paper. Just won reelection in Ohio by a billion points. Puts a not-so-cruel sheen on regressive right wing wankery. Decent manner in front of the cameras – comes across a nicer guy than any of the other candidates. Has a handful of moderate-ish policy moves that could give him an electability argument.
Medicaid expansion might doom him to Huntsman status – a good thing for the country, as Huntsman would have beaten Obama and I think Kasich could put a scare into Hillary that none of these other mouthbreathers can manage – and he doesn’t seem to be on the moneybags’ radar, for reasons I don’t understand.
Another Holocene Human
@hoodie:
I disagree. He strikes me–and his classmates back this up–as someone with a high native intelligence who applies himself to dominate class rankings. What he lacks is CHARACTER. What he lacks is EMPATHY. All the stupidity out of him–not the calculated crap he says for Texas GOP primary voters, but the dumb stuff that he’s done–happens because he projects his own manipulative, amoral nature on everyone else. He doesn’t realize that politics isn’t JUST about power, and that most grown people can see right the fuck through him.
You’re right about him missing the substance of what he learned in school even though he got the grade. Paul said “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” An astute observation, I think! Cruz’ only regard is for himself.
the Conster
@Turgidson:
Kasich would be a good candidate because he doesn’t have serial killer crazy bomb thrower eyes, which is why he would never make it out of the primaries and he knows it, or, he couldn’t stand the scrutiny, not like that ever stopped the Herman Cains or Gary Harts of the world, or he knows he’d never raise enough money from the available billionaires.
Elizabelle
LOL. Jim Farber of the NY Daily News, re Cruz appropriating John Lennon’s “Imagine” theme:
Carl Nyberg
@Turgidson:
We assume people who make billions are smart, rational & pragmatic.
But what if they are people with narrow skills and react emotionally to things?
Another Holocene Human
@gene108:
You don’t need to, but it’s an option.
That’s where we’re at in 2015. Weep.
Turgidson
@the Conster:
Yeah, along those lines my only theory for why he’s not taken more seriously is that he’s clearly not good enough at being a ruthless, remorseless asshole to be the GOP nominee. Romney barely passed that test and he runs rings around Kasich in that department. Kasich has pretended to care about actually being a good governor (rather than use his office only to turn the state into a rightwing laboratory and piss of liberals, like Walker has) at least once, which is probably one time too many.
Another Holocene Human
@sparrow: Their followers aren’t a perfect mirror. They’re fearful, angry, and closed-minded. They’re drawn to a bully because they feel more powerful hanging with him or her.
Doug r
@Germy Shoemangler: I think Hillary will be fine. Unless they find that email where she goes into lurid detail about how she killed Vince Foster with her bare hands. She ain’t no cry baby.
Another Holocene Human
@Elie: You got it. Tribalism, whipped into a frenzy, can pass for psychopathy on the public policy level.
Another Holocene Human
@Turgidson: Agreed. When people say Walker scares them … Kasich is the one who scares me. The few “persuadables” we have left among the electorate LOVE a GOPer who comes off as “reasonable” and less ideological. Walker is just a dumb Koch bros do-boy. A rube. What’s appealing about that?
Frankensteinbeck
@Carl Nyberg:
We have long since established that we do not live in a meritocracy. Not only are rich people not by necessity smarter than poor people, they are insulated by their wealth. They can be stupid and still be rich in ways that stupidity would leave a poor person starving. Crazy unrealistic idealism, in particular, has very little cost to them.
The GOP sugar daddies are not Lex Luthor. They’re John Schnatter, narcissistic assholes who throw toddler tantrums when told what to do.
boatboy_srq
@Bobby Thomson: That’s only because I recognize the breed, and refuse to have more to do with him than is absolutely necessary (e.g. shredding him in blog comments). If you want proofs they’ll be easier to get from people who actually listen to him not talking to the rubes he’s grifting – say, his classmates, professors or former coworkers.
Calouste
Wonkette mentions a ringing endorsement for Cruz from Rep. Pete King (R-IRA):
Lavocat
@Cervantes: Um, yeah.
Another Holocene Human
@the Conster: Herman Cain was running for radio personality. He never expected to be (briefly) frontrunner, which caused him to get ‘vetted’ by the press and embarrassed. C’mon, the guy gave a speech with Pokemon lyrics and did a bunch of skits on Colbert. What’s interesting about The Lobbyist from Olive Garden is what his performance in the race told us about GOP primary voters.
Iowa Old Lady
@Doug r: I hope so, but if there’s one thing the Ken Starr investigation showed me, it’s that if you poke around long enough, you can find something and use it to provoke something bigger.
Lavocat
@pseudonymous in nc: Wrong. This continues to be a valid constitutional point despite people wanting to wish it away. It was a problem for Gov. Arnold, it was a problem for Gov. Jennifer Granholm, and it is going to be a problem for Cruz. Period.
Another Holocene Human
@Calouste: Unlike Cruz, Peter King likes the elected office where he’s at and intends to stay there. He can nutpick GOP crazies all day long (just as Bill O’Reilly does–same exact shtick) and remain the “truth teller” and “great, smart guy” to his voter base.
Just don’t mention his utter hypocrisy on terrorism.
Another Holocene Human
@Lavocat: Correct me if I’m wrong, but neither of them had an American citizen as a parent.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
At 7 they hated girls. By 10 the were starting to notice that there are differences but didn’t have a clue why. By 12, as you say hormones are kicking in and they only think with the other brain.
As hate is a big component of their processing and anything to do with women that isn’t domination and/or stupid is missing, I’d still have to stick with 7.
catclub
@Doug r:
And the Whitey Tape.
Turgidson
@Another Holocene Human:
I get the “Walker has won three times in a blue state” argument, but he’s won three narrow victories (not nailbiters, but certainly not blowouts) in off-year elections with so-so turnout. He’d have lost if the governor’s race coincided with Obama’s reelection. Kasich knocked off a formidable Democratic incumbent in 2010, then blew the doors off his 2014 (admittedly terrible) opponent. He probably would have survived in 2012 even sharing the ballot with Obama.
And you’re right – to the Village media dolts and the last few dozen unaffiliated voters that remain, all a Republican has to do is to occasionally talk or act like a moderate in order to claim that badge of honor until death. A Democrat is considered by default a radical moonbat unless they run a GOP-lite campaign. And even implying agreement with Barack Hussein Obama on any issue ever means you’re a captive of the party’s entirely mythical radical hippie base. It’s kind of…frustrating.
max
Incidentally, Cole:
so I feel pretty fucking confident about my prospects for longterm sobriety.
I’m not sure how long it’s been since you quit but good on you for managing it. Just wanted to mention that because I wasn’t sure if anybody here had. Keep up the good work, man!
max
[‘Just thought somebody should say that.’]
Lavocat
@Another Holocene Human: I was previously unaware that Cruz’ mother was an American citizen. I thought he was born of Canadian parents, in which case this situation would apply. Having been born of an American mother, it obviously does NOT apply.
Peale
@Turgidson: Yep. Hillary might as well come right out and say that she’s planning on deposing the socialist dictator obama to implement true communism.
Peale
@Lavocat: Since the “case” against Obama’s citizenship at one time rested on a reading of the law that stated that at the time of his birth, the Father’s nationality was the one that counted according to made up law, the hell with fair readings. Mom’s just don’t count.
Another Holocene Human
@Turgidson: Another point is that we as Democrats are getting fucked by corrupt, feckless, dysfunctional state level parties.
From what I heard, WI Dems put up terrible candidates against Walker, including running the same guy twice.
I live in Florida and it’s the same. Barack Obama won here decisively, but Florida Dems can’t win a fucking election. Lack of candidates and lack of will/expertise/money to run a GOTV effort.
Screw that, they have money, they just waste it on ads instead of hiring a ground team.
I’ve heard there is a regional power struggle in WI, Madison vs everyone else. Same thing in Florida, South Florida vs Central and North. Crist lost in part because South Florida threw a tantrum over their candidate losing the primary. There’s a strong powerbase for regional Dems in South Florida. The problem is that doesn’t translate into a statewide victory.
Another Holocene Human
Also, when I was going door to door for Barack Obama, yes there were a couple of liberal special snowflakes who refused to vote for Obama over pet issues. However, the main point of ward walking were the elderly, disabled, distracted, etcet, who needed all those repeated contacts to make sure they made it to the polls. Early voting helped, I got several people to vote that way.
On this site we complain a lot about Dem voters needing the “right” candidate. Actually it’s Dem voters need a powerful GOTV, although nothing will work if it’s somebody volunteers and voters don’t trust (like bankster Alex Sink… unfortunately). I fear that Dem campaign runners will keep missing this point and think Obama was just charismatic or whatever. Obama ran a tight, enthused, data driven, professional GOTV effort. That is the secret sauce!
pseudonymous in nc
@Lavocat:
Your apology to those of us who did know is accepted.
pseudonymous in nc
@Another Holocene Human:
Not helped by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s history of undermining any half-decent challenger to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen or Mario Diaz-Balart when their seats were ripe for the taking.
burnspbesq
@pseudonymous in nc:
So let’s make some.
David Koch
pets? they didn’t like Bo? What, were they dead-end
HillarySocks people?the Conster
@Another Holocene Human:
Both GOTV and candidates. It drives me crazy that every.single.republican KNOWS they’re going to be primaried from the right if they don’t bomb throw. Many offices don’t have even a centrist Dem candidate to even run a competitive race.
Germy Shoemangler
@pseudonymous in nc: My wife still gets emails from Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Why won’t she leave us alone?
Cervantes
@burnspbesq:
Er … OK, how?
Ruckus
Said this before, in almost any state, money is the key issue. If you live in an R+ area, first there aren’t as many Dems to run, then getting money for all the things necessary is much more difficult. The Rs have a money tree, Ds don’t. Yes it’s a diseased tree and rains shit as well as money but it still exists. Next comes the time it takes to run and win for office. After that you have to figure that if you lose, you have wasted a year or more of your life with most likely no income and now you’ve been out of the job market for a year and explaining that to an HR department most likely gets you passed over for someone with less “drama” on their CV.
You have to want it and want it bad to run. If you are in the minority party in that area it can cost in many ways that just don’t add up. It’s a shame that it is this way but there we are.
sparrow
@Another Holocene Human: I agree. In fact, ever since I read Altemeyer’s treatise on “The Authoritarians” (where he makes this exact distinction, between social dominators aka “double highs” and “regular” authoritarian followers). The description of the outcome of high-scoring right-wing authoritarians (RWA) playing a global simulation game is haunting:
“By the time forty years had passed the world was divided into armed camps threatening each other with another nuclear destruction. One billion, seven hundred thousand people had died of starvation and disease. Throw in the 400 million who died in the Soviet-China war and casualties reached 2.1 billion. Throw in the 7.4 billion who died in the nuclear holocaust, and the high RWAs managed to kill 9.5 billion people in their world.”
Ruckus
@Germy Shoemangler:
She doesn’t know any better?
No one tells her to stop?
I get on average about 5 emails a day asking for money from the various Dem outfits. I’ve sent them emails asking where my money would go, what it would do if I donated and I’ve never gotten a response from those. The only politician who has answered any message was CA Senator Boxer. And she stopped all communications when I complained about her support for some candidate in SoCal.
If I’m giving money, I give directly to the candidate or to Act Blue.
And of course this may be part of a much bigger problem, Rs give to anyone who has their email and says/does all the stupid things, Ds in general want those who may waste our money but at least attempt to work in a liberal direction, not just paste a D behind their name.
Chaplain Weasle
Who plays him on SNL? I can’t wait to see what skits they have lined up about him…
Another Holocene Human
@pseudonymous in nc: Look, you know how they talk about the “club” and how you aren’t in it?
DWS was part of Florida Blue Key when she was a UF undergrad.
All you need to know.
EthylEster
@Brachiator:
That’s because it’s at TPM, a site full of oddly pointless pieces.
And old Josh is going to squeeze every bit of pointlessness out of what he “knows”.
The guy is determined to make money on the internet and, if he has to fill his front page with duplicate links that often lead to “stories” that reveal little beyond the often stupid headline, so be it.
R. Johnston
@Cervantes:
He is charismatic in that his persuasiveness, his appearance of competence, and his appearance of intelligence are rooted in his style and are essentially divorced from the substance and logic of what he says and does. His greatest competence is getting people to believe that he’s competent, even if he also convinces most of them that he’s an asshole along the way.
He’s also presumably someone who, based on his academic and legal career, can retain and regurgitate facts. That works well in conjunction with his charisma to get people to believe that he’s smart even as he fails to evince any real understanding of those facts and even as he demonstrates a remarkable ability to believe things that are clearly and objectively false. The ability to understand how facts relate to one another, to approach the world analytically and mark one’s beliefs against reality, is a critical component of the kind of intelligence we mean when we say that someone is really, really, smart, and that’s simply not an ability Cruz has no matter how many people he’s convinced otherwise.
Tree With Water
“yes there were a couple of liberal special snowflakes who refused to vote for Obama over pet issues”.
Bingo! Right again. It’s just a couple, though. And even then, they’ll tell you their reasons were substantive. Obama policies can’t fail, he can only be failed by liberal snowflakes who are special (where have I heard that before?).
Germy Shoemangler
@EthylEster: Duplicate links! I’ve seen that on the New Yorker, where they’ll feature the same essay three times with different titles. The more clicks, the more revenue!
Katy
@David Koch: I have Bo’s full sibling living next door to me, and I am seriously considering claiming I was in fear of my life and shooting him – HE WILL NOT STOP BARKING, AND HE IS VERY LOUD, whenever I am visible – it has taken all the joy out of gardening. Neighbors have not responded to my requests for respite. Spring is really here now, and I am going to have to do something, I don’t know what. Maybe if I tell them how seriously I am upset … Anyone have thoughts for Plan B?
burnspbesq
@Cervantes:
All it would take is a Secretary of State who refused to put Cruz’ name on a primary election ballot. Surely the Bush Crime Syndicate must own a couple of those.
Cervantes
@burnspbesq:
OK, but on what basis?
Jerry
I liked Ted Cruz better when he was going by the name Tim Calhoun.
brantl
Nope, just willing to dive even deeper into the shallow end of the gene pool, to find the rubes he needs to make the money he wants. He’s just the American eagle from the Muppet Show, recast as a grafter.
brantl
@Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey: No, according to the law, he’s supposed to be born in the United States, or territory belonging to the United States, and clearly, he wasn’t.
Cervantes
@brantl:
According to what law?
Kim
Let Donald Trump worry about the birther stuff, its beneath us.
boatboy_srq
@Frankensteinbeck: [cough] Really? All you’re saying is that she’s grasping and unscrupulous, with a dash of amorality thrown in. That’s not merit; that’s means. I never said I believed she deserved the success she’s had – only that she’s very good at persuading people to give her money and notoriety, which in turn only means that the people she’s suckered probably deserve being grifted much more than she in any sense earned the money.