Of Reason and Treason

Why Ted Cruz is the Common Enemy of Humanity 

When he says he is going to shut down the government and then shuts down the government and then says he never shut down the government but he…

We may never know with any certainty what makes Texas Senator Ted Cruz tick, but by his actions it seems pretty clear that he cares only for making a name for himself and that he will put his overweening ego over the welfare of any one person, or even any country. And when he says he is going to shut down the government and then shuts down the government and then says he never shut down the government but he will do it again, dammit, you better listen.
Because sometimes you just need to laugh, I laughed the other day at Andy Borowitz’s quip in The New Yorker about Cruz finally getting around to actually read the ACA and oh by the way the U.S. Constitution. But laughter won’t protect us from our shared reality. It won’t save Ted Cruz and it won’t save us FROM Ted Cruz.
The fact that Cruz seems bound and determined to destroy the American economy over a single law that has been upheld by the United States Supreme Court, ought to outrage every American. We’re out $24 billion we’re never going to see again and he plans to spend more money he says we don’t have when February rolls around. And he’s not planning to use even a single dime of it to create a by-god-actual-job.
Nossir. And given the threat to the world economy, Cruz’s antics ought to outrage every citizen of every country in the world. Cruz and his tea party seditionists threatened the health, wealth, and livelihood of not only every American but of EVERYONE so he could be a hero to a few gun-totin’ homophobic, islamophobic, racist whack jobs who have lost the last two national elections.
The Cuban anarchist, who, by the way, owes Americans that $24 billion he squandered through petty self-aggrandizement, spoke Saturday at the Texas Medical Association’s fall conference about his “(t)reasoning.”
Watch courtesy of KVUE Television in Austin:

 

What you don’t know CAN hurt you. But as the old saying goes, it’s not what you don’t know that will get you but what you THINK you know, and the tea party repugicans think they know an awful lot of things that are pretty much all in their own minds. The trouble is, those things they think aren’t supported by facts.
America does not exist in a vacuum. America is tied to a complex global economy. If the United States economy had crashed, it would have dragged the world economy down with it. Cruz’s demagoguery is a threat to the whole planet. And he promise us he is not through.
But repugicans – especially tea party repugicans – don’t think about basic facts like this. Cruz scared not only people – liberals AND wingnuts – but fake people – organizations and corporations. He scared the staunchly repugican U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has responded by saying, “Enough silliness.” Scott Reed, who is senior political strategist for the chamber said Friday that, “The need is now more than ever to elect people who understand the free market and not silliness.”
Gee. Ya think? Good luck with that, by the way. We’ve been dangerously exposed to your talent pool.
repugicans say they want to run the United States government like a business – after they sell most of it in a yard sale – but repugicans don’t understand business; they don’t understand the free market.
So now we have Ted Cruz saying he “would do anything” to stop Obamacare and we have John McCain and Mitch “Hey, I got a 2-week paid vacation out of it” McConnell saying there will not be another shutdown over Obamacare. It’s not that McCain and McConnell like Obamacare; they don’t. But in their odd little ways they seem to like America more, at the least understand that if Cruz succeeds in his Cruzade to destroy the federal government they won’t have paying jobs anymore.
Cruz is doing what the American people want him to do, he insists. MSNBC put it thusly:

Cruz insisted he was acting on behalf of Americans who share his position. While his statement is not necessarily supported by national polls, he is able to assert enough anecdotal support, particularly in Texas, to form the basis of a critique of some of his Washington colleagues.

But even Texas Governor Rick Perry, who sought Obamacare funding for Texas before calling Obamacare a criminal act before finally encouraging Texans to enroll in Obamacare, is now essentially endorsing Obamacare and there is anecdotal evidence that Texans LIKE Obamacare.
If he really wants a war, shouldn’t Cruz instead begin his Cruzade in Texas, if all his evidence (sorta) comes from Texas?
Besides being gratuitously greedy and selfish, Cruz is being childish. Not only is he ignoring facts but he is painting himself as some sort of fearless messiah-like character persecuted on all sides not only by his enemies but the allies that have betrayed him.
Why those terrible liberals are even threatening to kill him, he says, and each repugican who says no to him only raises himself higher, at least in his own estimation. He says things like “I don’t work for the cabal bosses in Washington” and “I’m not serving in office because I desperately needed 99 new friends in the U.S. Senate.”
He’s not even doing it because the American people want him to do it because he knows how to read as well as the rest of us, and the polls clearly demonstrate that the American people do not want him to do it. He is doing it for himself, pure and simple, because in his twisted way he thinks this will somehow position him for the presidency in 2016.
We know this won’t happen because unlike Ted Cruz, we don’t reject the world of facts, but another old adage is to never underestimate the stupidity of your enemies. Yet another even more important adage is, never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake.