I’m surprised I haven’t ‘honored’ Ted Cruz before. He’s a freshman Senator who is widely hated by his colleagues, planning to run for President in 2016 and may be the biggest asshole in public life. And there’s a lot of competition when it comes to assholery; especially among GOP teabagger types. Above all else, Ted Cruz dicksmack from Texas is malaka of the week.
Despite Cruz’s overwhelming credentials, I’m going to focus on one recent malakatudinous episode: his declaration of manlove for the late, unlamented, and incorrigibly racist Senator Jesse Helms.Here’s what Texas’ Cross To Bear said about Jesse to the Deminted cretins at the Heritage Foundation:
Cruz recalled how he sent ten dollars to Helms when he was a kid,
joking that he “may have been Jesse Helms’ single largest donor as a
percentage of annual income.” He said he did it because of how much
people were attacking Helms, and brought up an anecdote about how the
famous actor John Wayne donated to Helms’ campaign, and Helms called him back to thank him.“Apparently Wayne said, ‘Oh yeah, you’re that guy saying
all those crazy things. We need 100 more like you.’ The willingness to
say all those crazy things is a rare, rare characteristic, and you know
what? It’s every bit as true now as it was then. We need a hundred more
like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.”
Senator Malaka is quite the wingnut name dropper. He not only wished 100 crazy Jesses on the Senate, he mentioned the original chicken hawk, John Wayne. That’s right, the Duke avoided service in World War II so he could play soldiers on the big screen. It strained his personal relationship with director John Ford for many years but that’s another story. My life is one gynormous digression but you knew that already…
Back to Ted Cruz. It’s classic that a raging, gaping asshole like Tailgunner Ted would embrace the bigoted malaka who was the biggest asshole in the Senate for decades. Unlike some other Southern segregationists, Helms never softened his hard edge and also was personally rude and hateful to a fellow Senator in 1993:
The
way Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun relates the story, Sen. Jesse Helms
entered the Senate elevator, saw her, and began singing, “I wish I was
in the land of cotton. . . . ”Helms, a Republican from North
Carolina, recalled his brief encounter with the Senate’s only black
member differently and described it as “a good-natured exchange,” an
aide said.Moseley-Braun, a Democrat from Illinois, told the story at the
National Urban League annual dinner Wednesday night, about two weeks
after another tangle with Helms in which she defeated his move to renew a
patent on the Confederate flag insignia.The incident happened
Tuesday, she said. When Helms stepped into the elevator, “he saw me
standing there, and he started to sing, ‘I wish I was in the land of
cotton . . . ‘ And he looked at Sen. Hatch and said, ‘I’m going to make
her cry. I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.’“And I looked at him and said, ‘Sen. Helms, your singing would make me cry if you sang ‘Rock of Ages,’ ” Moseley-Braun said.
This is the man who Ted Cruz wants cloned.Rachel Maddox tore Cruz a new one last night on MSNBC, which, in part, inspired this post. I also remember Jesse Helms hating on gays, AIDS sufferers, and anyone else he felt like demonizing and othering. Now that I think of it, he’s the perfect role model for the malaka from Texas.
It’s a pity that Ted Cruz won’t suffer any consequences for embracing the evil dead Senator.But the world has changed since GOPers ousted Trent Lott as Senate Majority Leader for lamenting Strom Thurmond’s loss in the 1948 Presidential election. The GOP has moved so far to the right that Cruz’s egregious malakatude will soon be remembered by his fan boys as just another manly expression of conservative purity. If he somehow becomes the Republican nominee in 2016, I suspect the 100 crazy Jesses quote will be all over the internets as one of Ted Cruz’s “greatest hits.” The good news is that 21st Century malakatude neither dies nor fades away.
I’ll let Todd Rundgren have the last word with his classic anti-Helms song, the chorus of which is “fuck you, Jesse.” Words to live by:
I know the teabaggers are bad at spelling, but math too? Someone should tell Rafael Ernesto (Che) Cruz that if there were 100 Jesse Helms clones in the Senate, Che wouldn’t have a job, seeing as how he’s a Canadian Cubano by birth.
As was pointed out at another source I saw this on, Helms wasn’t exactly the most gracious person to Hispanics (or half-Hispanics. Wonder if Rush would object if some extremists lefties started calling him a “Helfanic” or similar??)
But to be serious, Helms wouldn’t have given Cruz the time of day. And before someone says that is to Mexican-heritage, Helms was spitting venom well before the growth in number of Mexican Americans but in a time when the SE had a lot of Cuban refugees.
In fact, the only way I can figure that Cruz is acceptable to Texas Repugs is that there is a deep prejudice from Cuban-Americans (who see their family’s immigration as being composed of mainly highly educated professionals and represent resistance to the Iron Curtain) toward Mexican-Americans (who they see as mainly lower skilled, lower income riff-raff).
Could the balloon of Cruz running for prez be a strictly facetious and cynical attempt to make the repugs (and anyone they nominate for prez) look like the repugs aren’t racists and love the Hispanics?
1) I present for evidence the last few decades of the repugs.
2) I compare the reaction of the repubs in the last decade when it comes to questions of birth and being eligible to run for the presidency:
Just on the face of it, as I’ve commented before, while “native born” hasn’t been subjected to federal court review, for 200 years the understanding has meant being born on USA soil. Yet we have to compare the reactions to 2 actual presidential candidates plus Cruz.
“Show me the long form” Obama: Father wasn’t US citizen. But mother definitely was and he was born in Hawaii.
McCain: wasn’t really brought up as a serious issue that while both mother and father were USA citizens, he was born in a foreign country (albeit while father was on military orders and he very likely was born on a military base – which could be stretched to the breaking point by saying that a military base is USA land).
Cruz: Father wasn’t USA citizen at Cruz’s birth. Mother was citizen. Born in Canada (who I’m sure would resent being told that they are part of the USA soil).
preznit? people don’t want more war, but i am pretty sure they won’t want another texas cowpie.
Pansy, wish I could agree with you on that. But I can’t get it out of my mind that there has been a move to have Jeb run for prez (admittedly he moved to Florida).
And I can’t forget that while Dubya was sitting prez, there were calls for putting his face on a coin (despite the country going downhill, despite current attempts to forget that he even existed, he was a sacrosanct figure for 8 years).