Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

“woke” is the new caravan.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Optimism opens the door to great things.

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

They are not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Second rate reporter says what?

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Trumpflation is an intolerable hardship for every American, and it’s Trump’s fault.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread: Epistemic Self-Adoration

Open Thread: Epistemic Self-Adoration

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Alex Pareene at Salon picks up the latest viral Ted Cruz video, and explains why Cruz thinks he can abuse his fellow Repubs with impunity:

… Look at the video: He’s in a room of adoring — swooning — admirers and he is basking in their adoration. This is why he got into politics. And everyone who gets confused about why this whip-smart attorney is acting like the dumbest Tea Party wingnut imaginable should probably watch this video. He’s acting like this because he’s smart. It’s great politics to be a Republican in Texas who purposefully pisses off his fellow Republican senators with his intransigence and extreme rhetoric. It’s sort of like how Susan Collins has to act the sensible moderate (while voting basically as a party-line conservative Republican) because she represents Maine, but in Cruz’s case there is no end goal beyond advancing his own career. And legislative victories aren’t an important part of becoming a beloved Tea Party favorite. In this case Cruz may be taking credit for a legislative victory he really had little to do with, but it also doesn’t matter at all to this crowd that, for example, Cruz failed to stop Chuck Hagel from becoming defense secretary. What matters is that he was a huge dick about it, not whether he won or lost.

There is no way to way to stop or shame or embarrass or cajole a politician like this into following the established “norms” of political behavior. The bigger a controversial firebrand he is, the more he riles up both liberals and Republican Senate leadership, the better he’ll look in the eyes of the people who write him checks and made him the nominee for U.S. Senate to begin with. What Rubin (who is not remotely in touch with the actual activist conservative movement base) sees as whiny these people see as, you know, heroic martyrdom. Conservatives love it when their heroes whine about being persecuted!

Just look at this political science survey of FreedomWorks Tea Party activists: They’re ultra-conservative Republicans who hate the Republican Party. They also value ideological purity over pragmatism, to the point where winning victories matters less to them than loudly saying the right thing. (Not great on strategy, these guys.) People like Ted Cruz are doing their best to establish their personal brands at the expense of the actual Republican Party and even the conservative movement. And there’s no mechanism the party can use to get him back in line, because he doesn’t care about results and there’s an entire media and activist infrastructure set up to reward him.

Call me a cock-eyed optimist, but I think it’s great that Ted Cruz has decided being a rock star on the Tea Party circuit is better than boring old legislatoring. For one thing, if he’s as smart as his scholastic records, he’ll do a lot less damage being a public dick to Dianne Feinstein than he would writing ALEC strategy sheets. For two, the only thing fickle American voters love more than a shiny new idol wearing their party’s bling is a shiny new idol getting caught with a socially embarrassing sexual partner or a dramatically unsuitable substance abuse problem; the more Cruz pisses on his fellow GOPers, the more reasons they have to shine a public light on what he’s doing in the congressional cloakroom. And since Tailgunner Ted is already publicly flirting with a presidential run (now that he’s served a whole four months in the Senate), there will be no shortage of media drones looking for viral clips to enhance their own resumes, either.

Reader Interactions

41Comments

  1. 1.

    Calouste

    Tea partiers are fans of Team Asshole, and Ted Cruz is their latest draft pick.

  3. 3.

    Elizabelle

    I don’t know how much his fellow Senators — the Republican ones too — like being called “squishes” by the junior Senator from Tejas.

    Cruz might learn that we are the United Squish States of America.

  5. 5.

    johnny aquitard

    The teabagging echelon came of age during McCarthism. Now they’re old, it’s just nostalgic times for them, is all.

  6. 6.

    Hill Dweller

    @Riccardo Cabeza:

    The teabaggers are simply fascists. They are proud to be as unAmerican as they can possibly be.

    They’re also paranoid, racist and cowardly.

  8. 8.

    Jay in Oregon

    Tailgunner Ted is already publicly flirting with a presidential run (now that he’s served a whole four months in the Senate)

    Well, that black guy served, what, two years in the Senate before he ran for the White House? A white guy should be able to do the same in a quarter of the time…

  9. 9.

    Soonergrunt

    And that’s all right by me. Of course, the teabaggers with their “ideological purity over governing ability” mindset has its mirror image on our side of the fence.

    Cough, cough. Firebaggers! cough.

  10. 10.

    Boots Day

    Cruz is like a Republican parody of everything they claimed to hate about Obama: less experienced, more ideologically extreme, serious questions about his eligibility. And Harvard elitism!

  11. 11.

    dmsilev

    This is awesome. Researchers at IBM made a stop-motion film using individual carbon-monoxide molecules as pixels and a scanning tunneling microscope as the imager (and positioner of said molecules).

  12. 12.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    Ted Cruz is the living proof of what H.L. Mencken observed.

    No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

  14. 14.

    aimai

    This simply can’t end well–I don’ tmean for Ted Cruz. I think he’s going to do just fine. Its just that this free lance assholeness makes it even more unlikely that the rest of hte Republican party or the Republican Senators or members of the house will ever return to doing the actual work of governing. Its just not going to happen. Most people have no idea what their Senators do in the first place and no understanding for how government works–who draws up the budget and needs to vote on it (the house), what it means for legislation to be passed at all, what the president’s function is. Up until now we could rely on some kind of institutional memory of what the function of government service was. No longer. There is about to be an entire generation of GOP representatives who have simply got no idea that their job is to legislate and do shit to make the country function. They are free lancers paid by the nuttiest and wealthiest assholes around–and that goes for their voters too. They can’t/won’t be reined in by the voters, ever. So what is to stop them from just running their 50 percent plus of the seats they control in red states and in gerrymandered districts right into the fucking ground? Nothing.

  15. 15.

    Ultraviolet Thunder

    I’m in central Mass. today. Apparently the best way to get here is to fly into Hartford CT and drive 45 minutes.
    Instead, I was sent to Albany and slogged through the Berkshires for 2.5 hours on 2 lane roads. It was a lovely day and a beautiful drive. But frustrating.

    I need a beer, dinner and a drink.

  18. 18.

    Hoodie

    I hope Cruz and Paul both run. Cruz is smarter than Paul, but Paul is a member of the asshole white dude tribe by birth. Cruz is Marco Rubio without an asshole filter and no need to defer to Jeb, but he’ll really need to crank up the nastiness to overcome Paul’s built in appeal to the teabaggers. Could be a show.

  19. 19.

    MikeJ

    I’ve had my arm up inside wordpress to the elbow all day today, and I don’t even know php. Or I didn’t this morning anyway. Added extra fields to users, created custom forms for editing, searching, listing users in various categories with pagination, all in an API I knew next to nothing about, in a language I’ve actively avoided.

    Of course all anybody who looks at it will notice is the stupid css problem on the footer.

  21. 21.

    Hill Dweller

    OT: Krugman has been dropping the hammer on his critics(by name) in the last couple of weeks. Said critics have resorted to calling him “shrill”.

    It is highly entertaining.

  22. 22.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    Teddy boy is going to wake up next to a horses head in the near future, count on it.

  23. 23.

    Chris

    @aimai:

    Hasn’t this already been the case for a while? I’m pretty sure Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had no idea that there job was to legislate and do shit to get the country to function. They pretty much did nothing but sit there, smile and wave, leaving all the actual work to their cabinets, who were similarly uninterested in doing their jobs or anything else besides using their positions to shovel a ton of money to The Right People.

  25. 25.

    cleek

    They also value ideological purity over pragmatism, to the point where winning victories matters less to them than loudly saying the right thing.

    what is this i don’t even

  26. 26.

    R. Porrofatto

    There is no way to way to stop or shame or embarrass or cajole a politician like this into following the established “norms” of political behavior. The bigger a controversial firebrand he is, the more he riles up both liberals and Republican Senate leadership, the better he’ll look in the eyes of the people who write him checks and made him the nominee for U.S. Senate to begin with.

    Jesse Helms’ entire, very powerful career was based on this. Where Cruz has Texas, Helms had North Carolina.

  27. 27.

    Hoodie

    @R. Porrofatto: Not quite. As big a blowhard and racist asshole as Jesse was, he actually brought home the bacon and would behave from time to time. He was also pretty good at constituent service. I think Cruz just likes the limelight and doesn’t have to provide any other constituent service than satisfy teabagger id. That’s the innovation of the new conservative legislator; the government sucks, so they don’t have to do anything but grandstand. Jesse would not have gotten away with that.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    As it is an Open Thread, something thrown in as OT somewhere down below when there wasn’t one.

    Pope condemns Bangladesh ‘slave labour’ conditions

    “Not paying fairly, not giving a job because you are only looking at balance sheets, only looking at how to make a profit. That goes against God!” the pope said in his strongly-worded address. He was quoted as saying by Vatican radio.
    [snip]
    The 76-year-old later spoke to thousands of followers in St Peter’s Square, urging politicians to fight unemployment and calling for greater “social justice” against “selfish profit”.

    While as a lifelong stance I have no use for nor connection to religion of any sort, one also cannot simply ignore its leaders’ statements or blithely dismiss them as without any relevance in the public forum.

  31. 31.

    EthylEster

    His hick accent is as repellent as GWB’s.

    My head will explode if he runs for prez and I have to listen to him throughout an entire campaign.

  32. 32.

    NotMax

    @mai naem(emphasis mine)

    Henry’s began employing mentally disabled men in the 1960s and 1970s who had been released from Texas mental institutions. Hundreds of them were sent to labor camps in Iowa and elsewhere in the coming decades, where they were supplied on contract as workers to local employers.…

    One necessarily shudders at the thought of what the level of conditions and treatment in those institutions encompass.

  33. 33.

    Gex

    They deliberately developed an alternate media world because the main stream media was too “liberal.”

    Guess what guys, you got your alternative media world that eschews any moderation or balance. Good for you.

  34. 34.

    NotMax

    @Notmax

    @mai naem

    Oh, and while there is zero evidence alluded to in the article, still preliminary inquiry ought to be made into the possibility of the use of kickbacks to persons in those institutions to facilitate release into the contract program.

    There may be nothing untoward in that specific area, but without investigation, there is no way to determine that.

  40. 40.

    Lurking Canadian

    @NotMax: It is written that the pope’s opinions only matter when he talks about gay people and birth control. Rome talking about poverty, equality or peace just sounds like bar, bar, bar.

  41. 41.

    ricky

    Just look at this political science survey of FreedomWorks Tea Party _____________(fill in the blank) activists: They’re ultra-conservative Republicans ________(fill in the blank) who hate the Republican_______ (fill in the blank) Party. They also value ideological purity over pragmatism, to the point where winning victories matters less to them than loudly saying the right thing. (Not great on strategy, these guys.)

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