What if a man, for want of a better word, in the Senate for less than nine months fell over giving a filibuster and
nobody listened? Would it have happened?
Well, we found out the answer to that quasi-Zen
question when Ted "I'm Morphing into Joe McCarthy" Cruz, after vowing
he'd filibuster The Affordable Care Act until he "could no longer
stand", bloviated for exactly an hour before
having to be spelled
by Utah Senator Mike "Fuck Child Labor Laws" Lee. After 20 minutes in,
he'd already blown his wad of talking points and was blabbering on about
unemployment statistics.
Wow, Ted could only stand on his
wickets for an hour before having to slap the palm of another GOP
psychopath in this pathetic tag team of Tea Party Tantrums?
An hour is all Cruz could muster before giving way to someone else.
Such stamina, or the lack thereof, makes Sarah "Bible Spice" Palin look
like a rock in comparison. Compared to him, Wendy Davis has the staying
power of the Statue of Liberty. And the funny thing is, Cruz was buried
by virtually all the major newspapers who chose to put on their front
page real estate little stories like the President addressing the UN and
the events in Syria (although it can be said that, in his mini
filibsuter, Cruz expended so much hot air over DC that even James Inhofe
was beginning to believe global warming was for real).
Luckily for Cruz, the rules of the Senate regarding the filibuster are
infinitely more lenient and forgiving than they are in the Texas Senate,
in which old, white male Republican misogynists were just quivering for
the slightest excuse to shut down Davis and finally did so when she was
10 and a half hours into her own filibuster protesting a bill that
essentially would've stripped all women of their basic reproductive
rights. Teddy didn't have any such stringent standards to maintain,
although the GOP was grumbling in the background for him to sit down and
shut the fuck up. Rep. Pete King even went as far as to publicly call
Cruz "
a fraud" for engaging in "government terrorism."
The problem with being visible in politics even after such a short time
in office is that you're on a chain gang. You're chained to a lot of
other guys and if you just suddenly decide to fling yourself into a
ditch, as Cruz made a show of doing yesterday, then you drag a lot of
guys in after you. Remember that scene in
Apocalypto where the
Mayan slaves were roped together and one guy slipped off the mountain
and almost took the rest down with him? Yeah, that's what it was like.
Republicans aren't completely stupid and they know what's at stake in
next year's midterms, in which all 435 House seats will be up for grabs.
Cruz obviously doesn't care about anyone but himself and his ludicrous
political ambitions. Like Rubio, he got the bright white spotlight and
bombed like an Arab comedian at an AIPAC convention. He has no problem
with shutting down the government in his temper tantrum over ObamaCare
and even less of a problem, it seems, with taking down his own party in
next year's midterms. If the American public, for some bizarre reason,
wasn't already aware of how completely batshit insane the GOP is
regarding even tepid health care reforms as delineated in the ACA, then
Ted Cruz's stunt yesterday certainly put them on a lot radar screens.
And Cruz's McCarthyesque zealotry over ObamaCare is bordering on the
delusional and pathological and even other hind leg-chewing Republican
psychopaths like Pete King know that he's gone far, far afield of the
line in the sand that even they had the sense to draw. Maybe it has
something to do with the fact that since 2009, Cruz has
vacuumed up nearly $500,000 from the health care field, or perhaps it's too cynical of me to suggest such a crass thing as following the money.
But the fact is, while five plus years is thousands of eternities in
political years, I think even the people in Ted Cruz's home state have
gotten a clue as to what a mostly-empty sack of shit he truly is. As
with fellow Latino senator Marco Rubio, the GOP let Cruz stumble out
there in the spotlight when they should've known this Brycreemed Sterno
bum wasn't ready for prime time. And I say we should let them continue
to do so.
If the republicans want to be nasty on immigration, call Mr. Cruz by his real name.
But I agree, Ted "McCarthy" Cruz has a certain ring to it.
Anonymous said call him by his name Raphael Edward Cruz. I think that adding "McCarthy" to it would work for me. Raphael Edward "McCarthy" Cruz or even Raphael "McCarthy" Edward Cruz.
Cruz was born in a provincially owned and funded hospital, in Calgary. His Mom got to see her doctor free of charge. There was no cost for him being born in the hospital. His Mom got to choose her own doctors and specialists. Now if he and his Mom benefited from this "government funded" health care in Canada, why doesn't he want all Americans to have a similar plan?
Alberta still has about the same medical plan as it did when Ted was born. They haven't gone bankrupt. They don't have "death panels". Oh, and Alberta is known as "texas north". Yes, they have some oil.
They have a lot of red necks there also. However, the red necks do realize their children and their parents need good decent health care, which doesn't bankrupt them. It really is nice to be able to buy a home after your kid has had cancer and survived. You don't go bankrupt over cancer, the flu, or a kid with ear infections.