dagblog - Comments for "Theodore Fancy Pants Underestimated."

Thought maybe you might

artappraiser — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 04:39:30 +0000

In reply to Theodore Fancy Pants Underestimated.

Thought maybe you might appreciate knowing about this piece:

Ted Cruz’s Mask of Sincerity
by David Denby @ The New Yorker, October 30

Home page Intro: Cruz’s obstructionism is a seemingly nihilistic grab for power disguised as a principled opposition to Obama)

Beginning excerpt:

When Ted Cruz lies, he appears to be praying. His lips narrow, almost disappearing into his face, and his eyebrows shift abruptly, rising like a drawbridge on his forehead into matching acute angles. He attains an appearance of supplication, an earnest desire that men and women need to listen, as God surely listens. Cruz has large ears; a straight nose with a fleshy tip, which shines in camera lights when he talks to reporters; straight black hair slicked back from his forehead like flattened licorice; thin lips; a long jaw with another knob of flesh at the base, also shiny in the lights. If, as Orwell said, everyone has the face he deserves at fifty, Cruz, who is only forty-two, has got a serious head start. For months, I sensed vaguely that he reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place who it was. Revelation has arrived: Ted Cruz resembles the Bill Murray of a quarter-century ago, when he played fishy, mock-sincere fakers. No one looked more untrustworthy than Bill Murray. The difference between the two men is that the actor was a satirist.

Cruz is not as iconographically satisfying as other American demagogues [.....]

GQ feature fills in some of

EmmaZahn — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 17:30:02 +0000

In reply to He wasn't all that happy with

GQ feature fills in some of Cruz's bio:

Ted Cruz: The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas

It worked: Ted Cruz Now

artappraiser — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 19:41:17 +0000

In reply to Theodore Fancy Pants Underestimated.

It worked:

Ted Cruz Now Leading the GOP Race for President

PP Poll page says now the top choice of Republican primary voters to be their candidate for President in 2016. Which made me think: if anyone who is still registered as a Republican cares any more about not being one and the same as the Tea Party, they aren't the kind of person that gets out and votes in primaries.

And then I thought about how the reason the Congress is in the situation it is is that what we have is a whole lot of voters that used to have party affiliation but now consider themselves to be Independents, and they don't have any primaries in that "party." Now it's probably the case that a lot of those people never voted in primaries, even when they were registered D or R. But over the years, the system has adjusted to the situation where it is even less likely that they will ever do so.

Edit to add: I am not under any illusion this means anything but name recognition for Mr. Cruz. Still, the fact that he gets such support so fast tells you what is rewarded among GOP primary voters. And on further thought, I am highly reminded of the liberal/progressive blogosphere commentariat's years of chanting for Congresspersons with a "backbone." That any time someone did a Ted Cruz like performance piece for liberal/progressive causes, he/she became the new favorite flavor of the day in their section in the blogosphere. I don't follow the conservative political blogosphere, but I imagine it works very similarly.

LOL...Chris Cristy has a

trkingmomoe — Sun, 29 Sep 2013 07:43:03 +0000

In reply to Thanks, Emma. Compared to

LOL...Chris Cristy has a better chance. People from Texas don't retire here. He might carry The Villages. Anyways he would never carry Florida in the general election. We will have a Democrat as a governor then. It will be easier to turn out the vote then.

Thanks all for the timely and

Oxy Mora — Sat, 28 Sep 2013 17:47:21 +0000

In reply to Theodore Fancy Pants Underestimated.

Thanks all for the timely and informed comments. My instinct is that regardless of this shutdown business, we will be contending with Cruz for a long time to come.

I tend to agree with the viewpoint that he is more demagogue than anything else. He obviously makes up things as he goes along, the hallmark of a con man (is that inconsistent with being a demagogue?). I don't for one second buy the notion that as a kid he sent Jesse Helms a $10 campaign contribution---it sounds like an outright lie to me.
It seems to me that Cruz is closer to Nixon than anyone else I can think of. Nixon played the piano and awed the people. All Mr. "Kinky Boots" has to do in order to garner wider support from our star struck electorate is to don a pair of dark glasses and strap on a turquoise Fender Stratocaster.

Interesting list, Michael --

acanuck — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 19:49:22 +0000

In reply to I thought Josh's little

Interesting list, Michael -- Cruz, Spitzer, Rattner, Summers and Gingrich. As you say, dangerous people, but in each case their assholity came back to bite them in the ass. All have fallen from grace and from positions of influence and power (except Cruz, for at least the next 15 minutes). But their worst trait is also their redeeming one: they crash, but they don't burn. They bounce. Think Richard Nixon; we didn't have him to kick around any more, then we got to kick him again, and now he's enjoying a posthumous image revival. (I say we keep kicking.)

I'll add Cruz to the list of

artappraiser — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 19:18:41 +0000

In reply to I thought Josh's little

I'll add Cruz to the list of people like Eliot Spitzer, Steve Rattner, Larry Summers and Newt Gingrich

At first I thought this was a very astute comment, Michael, but then after reading the demagogue comment I posted downthread, I changed my mind. These are all "know what's better for the masses than they do themselves elitists," while Cruz panders to any nuttiness he thinks useful in some scheme in his head we don't fully understand yet.

Oxy, as usual, is right. But

jollyroger — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 19:17:31 +0000

In reply to Theodore Fancy Pants Underestimated.

Oxy, as usual, is right. But it's not "fancy pants", it's "kinky boots".

The person he looks most like

Peter Schwartz — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 18:26:25 +0000

In reply to He wasn't all that happy with

The person he looks most like is Bill Murray.

The best opinion I have read

artappraiser — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 18:04:42 +0000

In reply to Theodore Fancy Pants Underestimated.

The best opinion I have read on him is two comments by a "Boris Millman" @ The Atltantic on Garance Franke-Ruta's post, Ted Cruz's Senate Speech Revealed His Softer Side. My bold:

Boris Milman

• 2 days ago

Ted Cruz is not a complicated political animal. He is not a liberal. He is not a conservative. He is a demagogue, pure and simple. Demagogues are fundamentally non-ideological, and are perfectly happy to embrace any "idea" or "argument" from the left or the right as long as it appeals to the mob the demagogue is trying to get support from.

As Merriam Webster tells us, a demagogue is "a political leader who tries to get support by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason." Of all the millions of words written about Cruz in the last few months, this simple dictionary definition is by far the clearest and more direct explanation of who he is and what he does.

Boris Milman azt24

• 2 days ago

There are "left-wing" demagogues and "right-wing" demagogues. But regardless of the ideology a particular demagogue espouses, they are all fundamentally the same because they all employ the same dishonest and manipulative tactics for the main purpose of securing their personal advancement. This is what separates a demagogue like Ted Cruz from ideologues such as Ron Paul or Noam Chomsky.

And, in fact, Hitler had no coherent ideology in the left/right sense. The Nazis combined left-wing and right-wing populism in a fairly ideologically incoherent program. The only thing about Nazi ideology that was clear was that Hitler was the unquestioned leader.