It’s open season on Ted Cruz

It appears conservatives have finally sent someone to Washington who is doing what it was hoped he would do, and the proof that Ted Cruz is the real thing comes unmistakably in the form of the constant barrage of nonsense currently being aimed at him.

Someone is clearly upsetting the apple cart, and the apple carters don't like it one bit. So they're doing what they always do, which is trying to marginalize the offender by any means necessary. First we hear from the Associated Press, which was a respectable news organization before it turned into a left-wing propaganda outfit a few years ago, that Cruz is the scourge of all that is understood to be good and decent in polite society. This comes in a report about a story, which is being given scandal treatment even if they don't use the word, about the fact that Cruz holds dual citizenship in the United States and Canada. In the course of reporting Cruz's decision to a) release his birth certificate; and b) renounce his Canadian citizenship, the AP also explains:

Since taking office, he has embraced the role of Senate troublemaker, angering Democrats and even some Republicans with his outspokenness. Cruz has most recently joined with other tea party darlings in the Senate and called for partially shutting down the federal government in an attempt to block funding for the White House-backed health care law.

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So much dishonest editorializing in three lines. First, Cruz is a "troublemaker"? Way to rally behind the establishment, AP. Cruz sees that the way things are done in Washington D.C. is leading to sluggish economic growth and mounting debt, and he wants to radically change things so as to bring about a radically better outcome. The establishment wants to do things exactly as it's always done things, and the AP wants that as well which is why it labels Cruz a "troublemaker." Remember when the AP just reported straight news? Oh well. Tea party "darlings"? You do recognize that as a condescending shot, right? And Cruz is not calling for a government shutdown. He's calling for wise spending policies, and doesn't want to back down just because Barack Obama and Harry Reid will have a temper tantrum and try to take their ball and go home. This is classic AP dishonesty: Republicans stand up to Democrats' over spending, Democrats go nuts and refuse to work toward any sort of budget compromise, and because the whole thing leads to a huge showdown, the possible "government shutdown" is the fault of Republicans who didn't just play nice and give Obama everything he wants. The AP is the biggest bunch of dishonest hacks in journalism. Next comes liberal columnist Patricia Murphy of the Daily Beast, who sought out Princeton classmates of Cruz in the hope that she could find some who would paint him in a negative light. If you look hard enough, of course, you can almost always find someone who will do that to someone else, especially when the target has a history of being opinionated. So Murphy struck paydirt, as you might imagine:

"I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?" Mazin says of Ted Cruz. “Even in 1988, he was politically extreme in a way that was surprising to me.” By Mazin’s account and those of multiple members of Princeton’s class of 1992, the Ted Cruz who arrived as a college freshman in 1988 was nearly identical to the man who arrived in Washington as a freshman Republican senator in 2013: intelligent, confident, fixated on conservative political theory, and deeply polarizing. “It was my distinct impression that Ted had nothing to learn from anyone else,” said Erik Leitch, who lived in Butler College with Cruz. Leitch said he remembers Cruz as someone who wanted to argue over anything or nothing, just for the exercise of arguing. “The only point of Ted talking to you was to convince you of the rightness of his views." In addition to Mazin and Leitch, several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like “abrasive,” "intense," “strident,” “crank,” and “arrogant." Four independently offered the word “creepy,” with some pointing to Cruz’s habit of donning a paisley bathrobe and walking to the opposite end of their dorm’s hallway where the female students lived. “I would end up fielding the [girls’] complaints: 'Could you please keep your roommate out of our hallway?'" Mazin says.

Now if you wanted to work hard enough at it, you could surely do a story like this about just about anyone, so why isn't every member of the House and the Senate currently the subject of such an expose? Because most of them play nice and get along by going along, that's why. This Cruz, he's a problem, he needs to be eliminated. And for the most part, official Washington doesn't even need to do the job because their servants in the media will do it for them. Once a few stories like this come out, the next phase of the campaign is for snarky bloggers to take their cue and roll with several weeks' worth of jokes designed to turn Cruz into an object of ridicule. Whether it's about being Canadian, wearing the paisley bathrobe, racking up gambling debts, creeping out women . . . none of it has to reflect the real man at all. As long as it's backed up by the narrative - and remember, the same crowd creates the narrative - it's considered fair game. By the time they've blown their wad, the hope is that they've so damaged Cruz's political viability that he will have virtually no chance to be effective advocating for real change in the Senate, let alone run for president at some point in the future. Basically, they seek to turn him into a joke, such that the substance of anything he advocates becomes irrelevant. Soon stories in the AP and Politico will describe Cruz regularly as "controversial" or "eccentric" or "widely seen as odd" or whatever. This is what they always do. They tried the same thing with Sarah Palin. They tried the same thing with our boss. They try it with anyone who won't play ball. I don't think Ted Cruz cares what these jerks think or say, which is the very reason he terrifies them so.