ted cruz, statesman? puh-leeze.

I'm gonna come right out and say it.  Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is a puke.  I'm not usually this disrespectful toward Republican luminaries (OK, OK.  Maybe I am.) but this little worm deserves some special singling out for upping the ante in in lying, GOP smarm.  He makes John Boehner look like a fucking diplomat.

Interestingly enough, he's also a walking, talking PSA for passing federal anti-bullying legislation.  Which, of course, Ted's wing of the Republican party vehemently opposes since, to their feeble little minds, there's nothing more clean-cut, good old American fun than picking on the vulnerable.  But I can't help but wonder if Ted would have made the same sketchy choices if he hadn't been scarred so by cruel teenage hazing.

Ted looks for all the world like a high school sophomore debate team nerd who never grew out of it.  He is full to overflowing of that age's arrogance and unbreakable confidence that he knows more than anyone in the room, the one he's currently in or any other.

I can pretty easily imagine how it went for pimply-faced little Teddy.  Picture it with me as he got repeatedly athletic-taped to locker room benches or was hip checked into the hallway lockers to send his decks of 3x5 index cards flying halfway back to his homeroom or had his lunch tray tipped over into his lap.  After his cookie had been stolen, of course.

Most of those kids grow out of their early-teen social awkwardness and ostracization.  They go off to good colleges where they excel in math or science or economics to points that they're accepted into top tier grad school programs which ensure their entries into jobs that grads of those programs get.  Somehow though, Ted missed that memo.  Instead of taking the hints of getting repeatedly taped to locker room benches or having his file cards scattered all over the 2nd floor hallways of his high school, he dug in his heels and decided that, by God, he was going to show those mean seniors a thing or two.

He never grew out of all that shit which made him so goddamned unpopular back in high school.  Not him.  He now gives every appearance of having groomed and cultivated and elevated that unsavory skill set to the point where nobody does it better.  As I wrote, he makes Boehner look angelic by comparison and, even if the Senate's minority leader hadn't prematurely entered his dotage, Mitch McConnell wouldn't stand a chance against the junior senator from Texas.  I even read somewhere that the Republicans are rolling Paul Ryan out of semi-seclusion to try to calm the waters which Ted has whipped into a lather of political whitecaps.  Now there's a comforting prospect.

Ted has had some luck on his side, too.  He's parlayed geography (Texas.  Rick Perry's still the guv down there, right?) and a timeline (which finds the country more fragmented than at any time since Fort Sumter came under fire) into a disgusting celebrity.  He's jumped all over a very strange time and place and ridden it to the head of the column made up of people who actually put value on his essentially valueless shtick.  And I have a feeling that Ted sees himself on a mission from God.

Which was all well and good for Jake and Elwood Blues to be spouting in an SNL spinoff back in the '70s.  But Ted Cruz has nowhere near as smart a supporting cast as Aretha Franklin and Cab Calloway.  Maybe I'll wake up some Sunday morning and not have to see this little cockroach's smirking face leering out at me from the TV nor hear his pathetic, empty soundbites.  Pretty please??