Ted Cruz and Rand Paul were in Iowa last week. Cruz was interviewed on ABC's This Week, and he was pressed on the issue of why, but he refused to confirm that he is running for president...already. He's been in The Senate for seven months, and that's the first elective office he has held since he was on the student council, he says; seems a bit precocious to think you could be president with that kind of political resume as a background, but modesty isn't one of the impediments to delusions of grandeur that Cruz suffers. He has argued before various appellate courts but once when he argued a case before The U.S. Supreme Court, he lost 9-0. He says that now, he has a giant painting of himself making that argument hanging in front of him as he sits at his desk in his senate office. He says that it reminds him of what it's like to lose. Of course he doesn't take from his Supreme Court experience that maybe his ardor in that case or in any of the dozens of other cases he argued there as Texas Solicitor General that maybe Texas isn't the bastion of mainstream thinking that he would like to believe it to be. Nor, for that matter, does he see that having a giant painting of yourself arguing before The Supreme Court isn't a credible talisman of modesty and humility, but rather suggests the kind of unabashed egotism that can cloud one's judgment. But that doesn't concern me. What does concern me is that starting to run this early, Cruz might get discouraged before the Republican primaries for the 2016 presidential nomination start. If he realizes that he isn't the voice of anything near the majority of Americans that he thinks he represents ideologically, he won't be the party's nominee, and with him as the nominee, Hillary Clinton is virtually guaranteed to win the election. Cruz represents a sure thing, and those of us who consider ourselves liberal or progressive should be rooting for him every day. I may even send him a campaign donation. And furthermore, since the most logical opposition to the Cruz candidacy is Chris Christie, if Cruz hangs in long enough he will possibly be the reactionary counterweight to Christie's rational conservatism that the Republicans demand on the ticket, and Christie may be the only Republican who can beat Clinton. With Cruz as an anchor--I mean who would be willing to risk the ascent of Cruz to the presidency given the odds favoring less than a long life for the obese Christie--Clinton's chances of beating Christie improve by at least half. And then of course there is Rand Paul...the toilet flusher.
Paul became a senator, I suspect, by purveying every wild piece of Tea Party apocrypha that he could find. The first I heard was his plaint...in open session...about the toilets that didn't flush in his house as he questioned a witness from an executive agency responsible for toilet related regulations. He complained that well meaning but misguided bureaucrats like the witness promulgated regulations that led to things like his non-flushing toilets, and of course a flood of jokes immediately came to my mind, mostly related to what he was full of. I did my own research and came across a federal agency report regarding this very issue, including the canards that were flying at the time, and probably still are. The report debunked the myth with statistics, and since I have had my own experience with the subject, by the way. Our old style toilet wouldn't flush, so we got one of the new low-flow toilets, with which we have never had a problem. And Paul wasn't satisfied with castigating the nation's toilet regulators. He also objects to the fact that you will not be able to buy incandescent light bulbs anymore. This is a guy who thinks that we should be doing ever more drilling for oil so as to make ourselves energy independent, which is a pipe dream for more than one reason, starting with the fact that our oil companies already export over 100 million gallons of gasoline per day and from 200,000 to 400,000 barrels of crude oil as well, which those same companies then import back from other countries and then charge for exorbitantly. The excuse is that oil is a global commodity, which means that until there's enough oil produced in every country in the world to meet that country's demand, we will be exporting oil rather than selling it here. We won't be energy independent until everyone is, and that will never happen. But at the same time, conservation serves a good purpose for everyone, and that is what the light bulb regulations are about. There are other kinds of bulbs that consume far less energy, which people like Senator Paul should theoretically endorse in the name of at least approaching energy self-sufficiency in some sense, but as a libertarian Paul doesn't like any government controls apparently...even in a good cause...one that he himself thinks is a good cause.
So the Republican Party looks to be loading its foot-shooting pistol again, and I am more than willing to pass the ammunition. To all you Republican patriots out there I say, keep up the good work. We Democratic patriots will take all the help you want to give us.
Your friend,
Mike
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