Yes, Teddie can be a shit, often, but his recent interview appearing in Bloomberg Politics, in which he denounced his quasi doppelganger/evil twin Marco Rubio as being basically Hillary Clinton in a mansuit, was something of an eye opener. Cruz, rapping with Bloomberg scribe Sahil Kapur, came up with the following bon mots, among others:
“Senator Rubio emphatically supported Hillary Clinton in toppling [Muammar] Qaddafi in Libya. I think that made no sense. Qaddafi was a bad man, he had a horrible human rights record. And yet … he had become a significant ally in fighting radical Islamic terrorism.”
“I think none of that [proposals made by both Clinton and Rubio for intervening in the ongoing civil war in Syria] makes any sense. In my view, we have no dog in the fight of the Syrian civil war. [Rubio and Clinton] are repeating the very same mistakes they made in Libya. They’ve demonstrated they’ve learned nothing.”
“The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. If the Obama administration and the Washington neo-cons succeed in toppling [Bashar al-] Assad, Syria will be handed over to radical Islamic terrorists. ISIS will rule Syria.”
A variety of commentators have, well, commented that Cruz will say just about anything to get elected.1 Well, yes. But the fact that an unscrupulous, Princeton-educated (is that redundant?) demagogue thinks that the way to win the Republican nomination is to criticize neo-cons is good news. It’s true that Sen. Rand Paul has said similar things, but Rand is polling in the low single digits, while Ted, at 16%, is in a three-way tie for second.
Afterwords
It is the basic rule of the mainstream media never to express an idea that has not been expressed by an important person. By arguing that intervening in the Middle East is actually counter-productive, Cruz is saying things that no important person has said in Washington for a long time. We can’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth on this one. And, from a purely partisan standpoint, the thought of Marco and Ted taking turns for the next six to ten months punching each other out for being soft on terrorism or soft on immigrants is a pleasing one.
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Just about anything except whether he would grant legal status (of some sort) to illegal immigrants now living in the U.S. Cruz has said repeatedly that he hates, hates, hates amnesty, but won’t say what he would do with the 11 million odd rapists/good people now residing in the U.S. sans legal status, except that he won’t boot them out a la Donald Trump. His “answer,” that we can’t decide anything until our borders are “secure”, is the last, or rather the first, refuge of a scoundrel (see Krauthammer, Charles) since 1) our borders are actually pretty secure right now, and 2) all the right-wing proposals for a secure border (twin twenty-foot walls with a fifty-yard no-man’s land in between, patrolled by packs of rabid wolves) will take several decades to complete. ↩︎
