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:
