'Oh spirit of Reagan, I summon thee and bind thee to my will.'
Ted Cruz, the presidential candidate for people who
never learned to use their inside voices:
“Obama is not a disaster because he was a senator,” said Cruz. “Obama is a disaster because he’s an unmitigated socialist, what he believes is profoundly dangerous, and he’s undermined the Constitution and the role of America in the world.”
The word
socialist is boilerplate at this point; I'm more interested in the
unmitigated part. What qualifies someone as an
unmitigated socialist? Has Cruz ever described anyone as a mitigated socialist? Oh, the philosophical questions this raises.
That aside, the context here is Ted Cruz nursing a bruised ego because certain unnamed Republican wags would prefer the Republican candidate be picked from the ranks of their governors instead from either the House or the Senate. If I may paraphrase the logic, it is because the House and the Senate are filled to the brim with unserious kooks and they fret that it would be impossible for any would-be president from either body to wash that unholy stink off themselves before the general election rolls around. Ted Cruz, who is the self-appointed king of unserious House and Senate kooks, considers this a party plot against him personally. He would not necessarily be wrong.
"In this race, most of the establishment moderates are coming from the ranks of the governors. And so suddenly, every time you turn on Fox News, there’s some D.C. greybeard saying, ‘It’s got to be a governor! Got to be a governor. Those are the only choices imaginable!’"
And pity the poor greybeards who have to plead with their Fox News audiences to hold tight to just a wee little bit of sanity, instead of nominating Shouty McScrewYou or another member of the new confederacy. Compared to Ted Cruz the brother and ideological twin of the Worst President Ever looks like like an outright statesman, and the wealthy fop who won the nomination the last time arounds exudes compassion; watching the future debate stage fill itself with candidates like Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio is, for most longterm party functionaries, the stuff of flop sweat.