Friday, February 22, 2013

GOP's Ted Cruz, a Joe McCarthy rising star


Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz's  odyssey toward an even more debased  GOP  dropped him off on a stage in Independence, Oh., this week  for the Cuyahoga County Republican Party's annual  in-name-only dinner toast to  Abe Lincoln.  For the evening Cruz received a share of partisan  huzzahs for his cockeyed  mythology and the published reports didn't hesitate to refer to him as a "rising star" in national politics.  That destined-to-be ephemeral title seems to be catching on at least with his bug-eyed gang, which tells you how easy it is today to be an acclaimed  star if you traffic in saying a lot of crazy things.

In Cruz's  case, the freshman Texas senator has slandered  Chuck Hagel by questioning whether the decorated war veteran and nominee for Secretary of Defense was on the payroll (maybe $200,000!) of  America's worst  enemies, say, Iran and North Korea.  He couldn't prove it, but that's part of Cruz's mystical  M.O.  It would have made more sense if he had accused Hagel of spilling spaghetti sauce on his new necktie or not lowering  the toilet seat.

Cruz also tossed in his world-view that Iran praised the Hagel nomination - which it didn't.

The rising star - `Whoops, now I'm saying it -   is drawing a lot of attention for being a reincarnation of Red-baiter Joe McCarthy for his questioning of his targets' patriotism.  Writing  on the New Yorker's blog, Jane Mayer recalled that Cruz,  a Harvard law school man as was Obama,   once  declared in a speech that Obama would have made a "perfect president of  Harvard Law School"  because there were  a dozen Marxists on the faculty.

Well, the GOP has had a series of rising stars that immediately come to mind. Sarah Palin.  Tim Pawlenty. Bobby Jindal.  And the party ended up with the likes of John McCain and Mitt Romney at the top of the tickets.

So I'll stick with the big Thermador kitchen appliance ad in Smithsonian magazine that says:  "Some stars burn brighter than others". It's also true that, conversely,  some stars are not very bright at all.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This one appears to be especially dim.

David Hess said...

For a time, the U.S. House was the repository of most of Congress' Latter Day Demagogues. But the Senate, even without former Sen. Jim DeMint, also remains a safe haven for LDDs. As a graduate of one of America's prestigious colleges, Texas' Cruz should know better than to spout spurious accusations without a shred of evidence. He must have skipped class the day of the ethics lecture.