Despite how he may seem online at times, I have no doubt in my mind that Ted Cruz is a smart man. Unlike those people, in an effort to hold on to their sanity in the face of a world making increasingly less sense by the day, who claim Donald Trump is secretly a genius even though he frequently comes off as not so bright, I believe that Cruz contains that rare mix of cleverness and tactical shrewdness needed to become a power player in Washington. He knows the meat his constituents want to be fed, and he’s not afraid to look dumb in front of everyone else to please them.
It’s a strategy that’s made him a household name in American politics, and one that could have taken him to the highest office in the land; there was never any guarantee that Cruz would one day be President, but it didn’t seem so impossible either. But alas, it is not going to be, which means I think it’s time someone sat down with Ted for a heart to heart talk about how he can stop embarrassing himself online in hopes of future Presidential glory.
Cruz’s latest in a long string of embarrassments is his suggestion that recently fired by Disney director James Gunn needs to be prosecuted as a sex criminal for the tweets that got him fired. And while most would agree that the tweets in question are in bad taste, here’s a list of things that Ted Cruz thinks are worth investigating:
*Gunn being upset about poor hotel shower water pressure.
*Gunn making fun of Louie Anderson
*Gunn suggesting that he had sexual relations with a protocol droid
Now sure, there are a few tweets there that if you bend over backward and play willfully dumb could maybe sort of be read as someone confessing to foul crimes, but it does require you to bend over backward and play dumb to get there. At the very least, it’s a tweet that shows the Cruz is a reactionary who lacks critical thinking skills, and while no one voting for Cruz cares if he knows how to think critically, it is a bit embarrassing that he represents Texas to the rest of the world.
It also proves that he’s a hypocrite. Now I’m typically the first person who will say “Republican politicians don’t care about looking like hypocrites because they don’t actually believe in anything other than holding on to what little power and money they can,” but it’s particularly embarrassing that he’s holding up his credentials as someone who fights sex criminals when he endorsed Donald Trump not two years ago; I’ve yet to see Cruz walk back that endorsement the way that he did with Roy Moore.
Of course, the Gunn situation is just the latest attempt by Cruz to salvage what little political capital he has left, after—apologies for going full alt-right here, but there’s really no better description of what happened—Donald Trump revealed how much of a beta male Cruz is during the last election cycle. Trump said terrible things about Cruz’s family, and Cruz rewarded him in the most un-Texan way possible by falling in line.
And that’s why Ted Cruz is never going to be President. Republicans don’t care if the leader of their party is a coward as long as he projects strength. By falling in line with Trump, after everything that happened in the campaign, Cruz proved once and for all for all his tough talk he will always be a follower instead of a leader, and there’s no one in his life he won’t toss under the bus in an effort to hold on to what power he has.
I take no pleasure in explaining to someone that their dream is never going to come true. It’s not easy having to explain to someone who has tried so hard to matter that he’s going to be nothing more than a historical footnote. But that’s all that Ted Cruz is going to be, and the sooner he understands that the happier he’ll be and the better his Twitter feed will be. I’m still not going to follow him, mind you, but at least if he stops saying dumb things he might not get retweeted into my timeline, and that would be just lovely.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2018.
