Yes, that's right. Villagers are in love with Ted Cruz and see him as the Great Hispanic Hope for the 2016 GOP bid for the presidency. Pay no attention to the coy denials on Fox News, because Politico has the hots for Cruz at the top of the ticket, among others.
Google Alerts regurgitated a list of links a mile long today. Allow me to share some of them with you, but have your barf bags ready.
Politico aka Republico:
More importantly, Cruz is arguably the most compelling conservative political activist/intellectual since William F. Buckley in his heyday at the National Review and on the public affairs show “Firing Line.” Cruz’s intellectual pedigree is both deeply meritocratic and deeply ideological. He was a star student at every level. His father, Rafael, the Cuban émigré who grew to despise the Fidelistas he once fought with, urged Cruz to steep himself in the canon of Western conservative thought. Cruz went onto Princeton, and his mentor was perhaps the leading conservative intellectual in academia, Robert George. He then attended Harvard Law School where, like Barack Obama, he served on the law review. Like Buckley and Obama, Cruz has a silver tongue, as anybody who has listened to him on the floor of the Senate can attest. The fact that he was a champion debater at Princeton, and later, as Texas solicitor general and in private practice, a very skilled appellate lawyer who has argued eight cases before the Supreme Court, merely ratifies a legitimately earned expertise.
So Cruz has a great delivery system — he’s got the perfect rhetorical combination of having a coherent worldview that he can transpose for voters into demotic, accessible language. One can see that even when he’s casually accusing Chuck Hagel of giving aid and comfort to the North Koreans — part of the reason he outrages his colleagues is that he already commands the Senate floor and the media. And what he is delivering is the perfect exemplification of the entire panoply of Republican base politics, or, if you prefer, tea party politics (Which, by the way, is merely another name for a reconsolidated umbrella coalition of all the deeply held beliefs of the GOP base over the past several decades — nothing new under the sun.)
Ooooh la la. "Compelling conservative"? "Intellectual"? The guy who worries that Glenn Beck will become a political prisoner, who claims Samantha Power 'grovels before tyrants'?
There's some silver-tongued compelling rhetoric, eh?
Moving on to the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky totally agrees with Politico. Consensus building!
Tucker Carlson's rag, The Daily Caller, boasts that Cruz is preferred by more Republicans than Rick Perry. Maybe they realize Cruz is more likely to remember all three bullet points in a debate.
The Atlantic Wire speculated that Cruz was this cycle's Barry Goldwater back in May.
Let's not forget a few things about Barry Goldwater, like his warmongering, paranoid ways and his deep associations with the John Birch society, something Cruz likely shares as a common affinity given his rhetoric and hardline conservative positions.
Joan Walsh had it right, though.
But Cruz is a far-right ideologue. Despite his surname, he’s unlikely to help the GOP win over Latinos – he only got 35 percent of the Texas Latino vote in 2012, less than John Cornyn got in 2010, and besides, he sometimes plays down his Latino (Cuban) roots, proclaiming himself Irish and Italian (on his mother’s side) as well. He’s positioning himself to win the Tea Party primary but he’ll never win a general election.
And Digby warns:
Yes, I realize that he is a nutcase who has no chance, yadda, yadda yadda. But I think it's a good idea to keep your eye on dangerous people like this. Things happen. Economies crumble, wars start. You don't ever want dangerous demagogues on a national ticket. Ever. It's too big of a risk.
Right, which is why Sarah Palin was on the 2008 ticket. Really, Villagers, could you possibly let us hold the midterm elections before you anoint the 2016 front runners?
