Ted, We Hardly Knew Ye

By BARRY FRIEDMAN

Remember when Senator Ted Cruz was a mensch?

Stay with me.

It was July 21, 2016, during the Republican National Convention, the night before the GOP officially lost its mind, soul, and bearings and nominated Donald Trump.

Cruz was allowed to make his speech in primetime.

It was understood Cruz would pledge his fealty.

“I congratulate Donald Trump on winning the nomination last night,” Cruz said to the assembled, “and like each of you, I want to see the principles that our party believes prevail in November.”

It was the only time during the speech Cruz mentioned Trump by name.

And the delegates in the hall noticed.

They booed, jeered, started to chanting, “We want Trump!”

In response, Cruz told them, “Don’t stay home in November. Stand and speak and vote your conscience.”

That was it. No endorsement, no curtseying.

When the speech was over, things got scary and silly. The crowd berated Heidi Cruz, the senator’s wife (more on her in a moment), with chants of “Goldman Sachs,” where she worked, before she, for her safety, had to be escorted out by security. Sheldon Adelson, who had a private suite at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, refused the senator admittance. Chris Christie, an unapologetic Trump sycophant at the time (unlike being an apologetic one now) said Cruz’s speech was awful and selfish. Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, who had learned to curtsey and smile, all of whom though Cruz had made a career-ending mistake.

At that moment, Ted Cruz was every bit as obnoxious, disingenuous, and sanctimonious as he had always been, (as he is now) — but that he was not a sycophant, not a coward.

After Cruz’s speech, many liberal commentators in essence concluded Cruz was settling “all family business.” During the campaign, Trump had retweeted an unflattering picture of Heidi Cruz next to a glamorous shot of his own wife, Melania, with the caption, “No need to ‘spill the beans,’” the photo caption reads. “The images are worth a thousand words.” Trump had said of Raphael Cruz, the senator’s father:

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it. I mean, what was he doing — what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”

The Godfather imagery about the family business was a stretch but there was something to it.

The morning after the speech, Cruz, responding to a reporter’s question about promises all GOP candidates during the campaign had made to endorse the eventual nominee, said, “That [Republican party] pledge was not a blanket commitment … that if you go and slander and attack Heidi, that I’m going to nonetheless come like a servile puppy dog and say, ‘Thank you very much for maligning my wife and maligning my father.’”

Before then, Cruz had called Trump a “serial philanderer,” an “amoral pathological liar, “a braggadocios, arrogant buffoon.”

He was right then. He’s right now.

But those moments were the exception, not the rule.

“Here’s the thing you have to understand about Ted Cruz,” former Senator Al Franken said, “ I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”

Former Speaker John Boehner called Cruz a “reckless jackass,” “Lucifer in the Flesh,” which was probably unfair to Lucifer, and then told Cruz “Go f**k yourself.”

Ted Cruz is and has always been the largest pustule on the acne-ridden face of the GOP. He refused to certify the 2020 election results, he blocked a Senate resolution honoring Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he read “Green Eggs and Ham” to shut down the government (then lied about doing so), he made a joke about Joe Biden at a dinner for Republicans in Michigan the night before Beau Biden’s funeral, he skedaddled to Cancun when the rest of his state was freezing, he questioned Beto O’Rourke for using “Beto” instead of his real name “Robert” in an attempt to sound more authentic when he, himself, was born Rafael Edward Cruz.

The list goes on. The man goes on. His horror goes on.

Watching his unmoored, racist, pissy tirade during the hearings last month during the confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson was the Ted Cruz we have all come to know and loathe.

Still, there were those days in 2016 when Ted Cruz had the chance to be somebody else.

His party didn’t want him to be.

That’s on them.

He didn’t have the inner core to be.

That’s on him.

There was a story that came out in March that Cruz berated airline officials at the airport in Missoula for not getting him on a flight, saying, “Don’t you know who I am?”

They knew, Ted, they knew.

We all do.

Barry Friedman is an essayist, political columnist, petroleum geology reporter and comedian living in Tulsa, Okla. In addition to “Funny You Should Mention It,” “Road Comic,” “Four Days and a Year Later” and “The Joke Was On Me,” his first novel, “Jacob Fishman’s Marriages,” a book about the worst love story ever, was published by Balkan Press in February. See barrysfriedman.com and friedmanoftheplains.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2022

Populist.com