How far behind the times is newly declared presidential candidate Ted Cruz? At least 155 years, believes Esquire blogger Charles Pierce, who alleged in a Sunday-evening post that Cruz “represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860” and that he’s “connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id” (but wait, there’s more: Pierce also considers Cruz “an extremist fanatic”).
From Pierce’s post (bolding added):
[I]t's Tailgunner Ted Cruz, the Calgary Stampeder himself, who will be calling shotgun in the Republican clown car at Liberty University in Virginia.
Is this guy freaking kidding?
Ted Cruz is an extremist fanatic. He represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860. He is connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id…His role in the government shutdown in 2013 is still resented by many of his fellow Republicans, especially the comical presumption by which Cruz went behind John Boehner's back—or over his prone and motionless body (opinions vary)—to gin up the fringier denizens of the monkeyhouse.
But that's the Republican party's problem. Our problem is that Cruz's prescriptions for the country set an outward boundary for the right side of the political spectrum that virtually is invisible to anyone to the left of Richard Nixon. That's the starting point for the rest of the Republican field. He's no less bughouse on the Affordable Care Act than he was when he tried to wreck the government over it two years ago. He wants to close the IRS. He is absolutely sure about all the bad ideas he supports. He looks in the mirror and sees more than a statesman. [H]e sees a redeemer. You will be told that the rest of the field constitutes some sort of ill-defined "middle." That's nonsense. This is still the party in which Ted Cruz is considered a serious person because there are enough people in The Base who support him and his retrograde agenda. The 2016 election has begun. The bar is set where you need a metal detector to find it.
Also on Sunday, the New Yorker’s fake-news correspondent Andy Borowitz posted a Cruz item, excerpted below:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – A disturbed Canadian man wants to try to get into the White House, according to reports…
In 2013, he gained entry to the United States Senate and was heard quoting incoherently from a children’s book before he was finally subdued.
More recently, he was heard ranting about a plan to dismantle large components of the federal government, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the nation’s health-care program.
