On Monday, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) announced his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination. There are only two ways to assess this: Either he is delusional, or as fellow Republican Representative Peter King (R-NY) points out, Cruz is a clown. I'm not sure which Cruz would prefer.
But I am certain that the media has not made a distinction between the two. For some reason, the media for the most part has treated Cruz's announcement at face value and with a straight face. Now, I understand the goal of the media is to be neutral. But being neutral does not mean being stupid. If a Senator stood in front of the White House and screamed: "The sky is falling, the sky is falling," would the media merely report it without some sort of context? I think not.
Representative King: "We need intelligent debate in the country. Ted Cruz may be an intelligent person, but he doesn't carry out an intelligent debate," King said. "He oversimplifies, he exaggerates and he basically led the Republican Party over the cliff in the fall of 2013. He has shown no qualifications, no legislation being passed, doesn't provide leadership and he has no real experience. So, to me, he is just a guy with a big mouth and no results."
So why exactly is Cruz running? Does he think he can win? Well on Tuesday, his wife Heidi took a leave of absence from her job at Goldman Sachs, forcing Cruz, a man of deep conservative roots, to sign up for medical insurance under the Affordable Health Care Act, which he has voted to repeal nearly 60 times! Of course, he could have stood on a firmer platform and paid for medical insurance out of his own deep pockets. But that apparently is not the Cruz way.
If Sen. Cruz ever even fantasized about being the Republican Presidential nominee, as soon as he signed that enrollment form, he simultaneously signed away any hope against hope of succeeding. Politics can breed double talkers, and politics can tolerate hypocrites cloaked in righteousness. But voters surely dislike them both.
As for the media, welcome to the side show.