(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day: Ted Cruz- 2023 Update [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-11-03 On this date in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, as well as 2022, “Fanatical Republican Extremist of the Day posted profiles of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a man the general public finds the most loathsome and revolting personality in American government, with a “Frank Burns” energy he exudes to truly cement himself in that title. Sen. Cruz is one of the most willfully repugnant heels in the GOP these days, who revels in causing outrage among those on the left, as if it’s a form of sustenance he needs to survive day to day. Ted Cruz (a.k.a. Rafael Cruz) has not only inherited an uncanny likeness to legendary “Red Scare” perpetrator Sen. Joe McCarthy, he has also adopted his tactics, making baseless claims to demonize anyone to the left of his far, far right agenda while sneering through media interviews where he plays the victim of a “vast liberal media conspiracy” when he’s called out for being a total douchebag (Cruz actually accused the moderator of the third GOP Primary debate of liberal bias in 2016 for asking him a question he didn't want to answer about the debt ceiling). It’s hard to pick any one single moment as Cruz’s potential lowest point in politics as among his most revolting moments included when he advocated for U.S. surveillance of Muslim communities to "patrol and secure" practitioners of Islam, when he sat down for an interview with the leader of the anti-gay hate group, the Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, and spread lies about how transgendered people are sexually assaulting women in public bathrooms, when he blamed Democrats for not caring enough about violence against the LGBTQ community after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and called a witness to testify in Congress who immediately accused two Muslim Congressmen, Keith Ellison and Andre Carson, of being secret members of the Muslim Brotherhood. Sen. Cruz was the driving force behind the 2013 Government Shutdown, and then was shocked when his GOP colleagues held him accountable for it when it quickly proved a failed endeavor. Opinion polls have shown that the more people who learn Ted Cruz exists, the more people polled also develop an unfavorable view of him, he decided to make a run for the White House in 2016, only avoiding being the biggest racist, sexist troll of the bunch because Donald Trump was in the mix. Ted Cruz once filibustered for 21 hours straight in Congress (which he ignorantly compared to the Bataan death march), and by “filibuster” I mean “talks ad nauseum while no other Congressional business was scheduled”. The highlight of that speech was perhaps when he misinterpreted the meaning behind the classic children’s book “Green Eggs and Ham” in regards to the Affordable Care Act, and interpreted to be about someone who was justifiably stubborn, rather than a tale of someone who should be open to new things. Without irony, he called himself a "modern day Galileo" for his brave stance in denying climate change AGAINST all science and reason, which is precisely the opposite of what Galileo did back during the Renaissance. Cruz single-handedly held up government aid to fix the lead-contaminated water system in Flint, Michigan for no particular reason except that he’s just a dick and could. Cruz is such a callous prick that he actually stated joking about Vice President Joe Biden while he was grieving over the loss of his son, Beau, and was not speaking publicly, and when news broke that former President Jimmy Carter was battling brain cancer, Cruz took it as a cue to bash his one term in office at the Iowa State Fair to garner Republican Primary votes. He considers the Supreme Court's rulings on same sex marriage "the very definition of tyranny". He has tried proving his manliness by placing raw bacon on the barrel of a machine gun, firing it repeatedly so it would get hot, and then eat it. Ted Cruz is a man whose honest goal is to see he U.S. Senate filled with himself and 99 other people just like his hero, legendary Senator and unapologetic segregationalist Jesse Helms. He is, in short, the most unlikable bastard in Washington, D.C., and we’re talking about a place that features alleged child sex trafficker Matt Gaetz. Even those from his own party has stalwarts like Sen. John McCain referred to him as a “whacko bird”, a term that Cruz takes as a compliment and former House Speaker John Boehner has called Ted Cruz "Lucifer in the Flesh", or alternatively, remarks that we would have to censor. Seriously, everyone hates Ted Cruz, down to his own family, as evidenced by the above animated gif of his daughter recoiling in horror at the thought of getting a kiss from him, and the unedited, raw footage of his family awkwardly trying to come up with nice things to say about him during his presidential campaign. Before his campaign was over, he was utterly humiliated in moments like when he named a vice-presidential candidate on his ticket to help him get more support with Republican women... Carly Fiorina, who proceeded to fall off the stage when she was introduced at one of his rallies. The oddest thing about the 2016 GOP Presidential Primary was that somehow, Donald Trump proved himself to be enough of a raging ***hole that we almost... ALMOST felt bad for Ted Cruz. If there was ever a metaphor for Cruz being overshadowed by Trump, it was probably when he was literally speaking out against the sentient rancid tangerine at the RNC, and Trump's plane buzzed his speech. I mean, when he got called "Lyin' Ted", we didn't blink, because Ted Cruz is a prolific liar. But when Trump started outright clowning him and called his wife Heidi ugly, or accused Sen. Cruz's father of being an accomplice in the assassination of JFK... Well, that was brutal. And it made it easy to understand why Ted Cruz went out on the third night of the Republican National Convention, and refused to endorse Trump. It was a stance most could agree with, not just because of Trump's utter ignorance and unfitness for office... but that he personally had besmirched Cruz's loved ones. Maybe for the first time ever, people nodded in approval for Ted Cruz for being a human being for once. Cruz promised he would not endorse Trump like a "servile puppy". But no, Ted Cruz isn't just a puppy, he's a little b**** of one, and came crawling back to endorse Donald Trump and actually phone bank for him about ten weeks later. He caved, and was broken. He voted for every horrible member of Trump’s “Cabinet of Horrors” as well as the GOP’s Senate attempt to try and repeal the Affordable Care Act that would have left 23 million people without health insurance and gutted funding from Medicaid. Ted Cruz barely won re-election in 2018 against Beto O’Rourke, spending 2017 trying to stabilize his flagging polling numbers by continuing to pal around with members of Anti-Islamic hate groups, and show up and speak at their conferences. Well, that and he was trying to raise money by, y’know, sending out fundraising letters that lie and claim Planned Parenthood is using government dollars to perform abortions and that “millions of babies are being killed in the womb”. He has championed people with views or backgrounds as revolting as Brett Kavanaugh and Alex Jones, and tried to smarm-splain Star Wars to Mark friggin’ Hamill, of all people, to gain credibility, getting none. That doesn’t seem at all desperate, does it? What could be even more desperate? Well, how about seeing Ted Cruz have to seek out a campaign visit from Donald Trump, a man who still won’t take back accusing Cruz’s father of taking part in the assassination of JFK. We can’t help but laugh, but seriously, Ted Cruz can’t look cool no matter what he tries. He can’t even successfully post a Facebook Live video without f***ing it up. Beto O’Rourke ran circles around him in their 2018 debate, perhaps the saddest moment being when Sen. Cruz was stumped into silence for a full six seconds when asked to discuss something… anything that has nothing to do with politics that would give Texans an insight into who he is as a person. Beto O’Rourke was seriously living rent free in Ted Cruz’s head, as evidenced by the photo of Cruz looking pathetic and staring at a photo of O’Rourke while sitting on a plane and then how his attempts to use photos of O’Rourke in a band in college where he wore a dress backfired, as others posted pictures of Ted Cruz in college, dressed up as a mime. Cruz was heckled out of restaurants in Washington, D.C after voting to put Brett Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court… And in June of 2019, that he came to the defense of a conservative pundit who was under fire for harassing a journalist from Vox with homophobic slurs (interesting battle you picked there, Ted)… then he tried to take a smarmy cheap shot on Twitter at Beto O’Rourke after his answer on climate change in the Democratic Primary debate, only to get ratio’ed and have most of the public mock him for his cluelessness on climate. When word came that Brett Kavanaugh had a SECOND accusation of sexual assault leveled against him, Cruz responded that people “need to let the anger go”, as if it’s wrong to be ANGRY ABOUT A SERIAL SEXUAL PREDATOR ON THE SUPREME COURT. But never forget that Ted Cruz is a repugnant, holier-than-thou Evangelical who will try and distract from say, the impeachment of Donald Trump, to be utterly repugnant, and refer to a 7 year old boy receiving hormone blockers to undergo gender conversion therapy as “child abuse”. Ted Cruz also has tried lying and claiming he never met any of the Proud Boys after Jan. 6th (he met their leader, Enrique Tarrio, in 2019), screaming at CNN’s Chris Cuomo about mask mandates and shutting down businesses to save lives during the Covid-19 pandemic, asking reporters to investigate the nonexistent “Obamagate” conspiracy theory, trying to taunt Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on science only to be called out for denying the science of evolution, and of course, the moment when he did our Senate proud by trying to arrange a wrestling match between actor Ron Perlman and Jim Jordan (really). As 2020 approached, Cruz was spreading Russian propaganda about Hunter Biden in the hopes of getting Donald Trump re-elected, and then raging at reporters for calling him out on it. As the election approached and the narrative attacking Hunter Biden never helped Republicans gain traction, Cruz decided to, what else… pretend he never was pushing it, and blamed Donald Trump for its failure to stick. Just… just look at these headlines from the past three years: January 2nd, 2021: Sen. Cruz affirms that on January 6th, when the electoral vote is being counted, that he will try to subvert American democracy and object to the counting of the votes by claiming nonexistent “election fraud”. January 7th, 2021: After the attack on the Capitol, calls grow loud for the resignation of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley. It didn’t help that Cruz’s campaign website was still fundraising over his objection to the electoral votes being counted. January 12th, 2021: Cruz’s lack of regret over the Capitol attack and the fallout causes his own communications director to resign, disgusted to be associated with the Senator going forward. January 26th, 2021: Less than three weeks since the Capitol attack, Ted Cruz goes on Fox News to declare “it’s time to move on” from investigations or accountability for the insurrection. February 11th, 2021: Desperate to talk about anything other than the role he played in inciting an attack on the Capitol, Cruz decides to champion former MMA star-turned-actress Gina Carano, complaining that Disney fired her from the Mandalorian after a series of transphobic and anti-Semitic posts. February 17h, 2021: As his home state of Texas is hit with a blizzard that short-circuits its entire power grid and leaves residents without electricity during a furious winter storm, Ted Cruz flees to Cancun with his family and does nothing at all to help them. February 18th, 2021: Sen. Cruz blames his trip to Cancun on his daughters. February 23rd, 2021: Cruz goes on Sean Hannity to pretend he’s the victim after the news coverage of him taking a vacation to Cancun when his constituents were dying in the cold makes him look like the ***hole he is. February 26th, 2021: Ted Cruz gives a rambling speech at CPAC that includes him trying to make jokes about fleeing Texas during the pandemic like a coward. March 14th, 2021: After Fox News host and white nationalist douchebag Tucker Carlson makes sexist comments about women serving in the U.S. military, Sen. Cruz grossly sides with Carlson, and chastises our own armed services for “bullying” the Fox News personality. March 25th, 2021: Cruz posts video of himself sitting in underbrush and claiming it’s from him waiting along the U.S./Mexico border to catch “human traffickers and drug cartels” in the act. He is mocked that he’s the one trying to sneak across their border to get back to Cancun. April 15th, 2021: Ted Cruz makes it a point to make a spectacle of himself refusing to wear a mask against CDC recommendations. May 2nd, 2021: Sen. Cruz threatens “woke CEOs” who would take steps to support any social justice or LGBTQ awareness by revoking certain tax breaks or antitrust exemptions if they do not support his own political views. May 4th, 2021: Ted Cruz goes to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of the man who called his wife ugly. May 29th, 2021:Sen. Cruz posts a video of a Russian military propaganda video and then laments that the American military has been “emasculated” in a post on Twitter. (Yes, he favored a foreign military over our own.) July 23rd, 2021: Ted Cruz claims the Major League Baseball “hates Indians” because the Cleveland franchise was choosing to move on from their racist mascot history and instead be known as the Guardians. August 12th, 2021: Sen. Cruz whines that the Biden administration is “persecuting” Capitol rioters for their role in the attack. (It was not a typo of the word “prosecuting”.) August 16th, 2021: Ted Cruz attacks CNN journalist Clarissa Ward for her reporting on the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan, ignoring that she was risking her life to even be there to file a report. October 11th, 2021: Sen. Cruz jokes for a second time about abandoning his constituents in Texas during a winter storm to go to Cancun. October 20th, 2021: Cruz turns the confirmation hearing of Judge Holly Thomas into a transphobic hate fest of lies, rambling on about a supposed attack by a “boy in a skirt” at a high school in Virginia upon a female student in a bathroom (from reports, there is no evidence the boy is gender fluid or was wearing any traditionally female clothing). October 29th, 2021: Ted Cruz, on the anniversary of one of the worst attacks against Jews in Americana history, decides it’s a great time during a hearing with Merrick Garland to defend the rights of domestic terrorists to give Nazi salutes at school board meetings. January 7th, 2022: After Tucker Carlson used Fox News to rage against Ted Cruz because a day earlier, he correctly referred to the Jan. 6th attack as a “terrorist attack”, he spinelessly goes on Carlson’s white supremacist power-hour to beg forgiveness for speaking the truth for a moment. January 12th, 2022: Ted Cruz tries to spread a conspiracy theory that the FBI actually started the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6th. February 28th, 2022: Sen. Cruz votes against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have established a right to physicians to perform abortions to save their patients’ lives. March 30th, 2022: Cruz votes against putting the extremely qualified nominee, Judge Kentanji Brown-Jackson, onto the Supreme Court. This after he spent most of the hearings checking on Twitter to see if he was trending for attacking her during his own questioning. April 19th, 2022: Ted Cruz goes on a homophobic rant wherehe claims Disney animation are trying to force LGBTQ content into their properties so hard that they’re going to have a cartoon where Mickey Mouse has sex with his dog, Pluto. Which means he equates homosexuality to beastiality. May 27th, 2022: Sen. Cruz goes to the NRA convention, only days after the Uvalde mass shooting. He tries to claim the solution to preventing further tragedies is to limit the number of doors into a school, and refuses to change his stance on gun control even when shown one of the victims dead in a child-sized casket by the grieving mother. July 27th, 2022: Ted Cruz votes against the PACT Act, blocking additional funding towards veterans exposed to “burn pits” while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a vote conducted out of spite that Democrats passed the Act the prior day. Several Republicans are seening shaking hands and fist bumping to celebrate screwing over the vets, while releasing a series of photos of the Senate GOP Caucus filling USO boxes and claiming they “support the military”. September 27th, 2022: Cruz is the lone vote in the Senate Rules Committee against a measure that would make it harder for someone to make an objection to accepting the results of a presidential election, like exactly how Cruz did on January 6th, 2021. April 23rd, 2023: A recording of a phone call between Ted Cruz and Fox News host Maria Bartiromo emerges where he suggests that he could create a “commission” to investigate election fraud that they both know doesn’t exist. Because he’s a seditious tool. May 18th, 2023: Sen. Cruz uses all his power to harass a private company over their marketing campaign. That’s right, because Bud Light hired a transgender woman, Dylan Mulvaney, to shill their beer, Ted Cruz wanted a Senate investigation into why such a thing would happen. May 19th, 2023: Cruz thinks he’s funny. He isn’t. He should have remembered that before he posts a photo of himself outside of “The Cancun Grill”, which only reminds his constituents of the HILARIOUS time he abandoned them to flee the country and leave them to freeze to death in a blizzard. June 15th, 2023: In a nonsensical rant on a conservative talk show, Sen. Cruz says “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.” Now, sure, this is pandering to the Qanon crowd a bit… but why the hell does he think a devil-worshipper would listen to the dread threat of… Pat Benatar? August 31st, 2023: Cruz tries to win hearts and minds by rallying against an imaginary cause, claiming that there are attempts to limit beer consumption to two beers a week, and telling anyone who would prevent him from drinking beer more than that can “Kiss my ass”. It’s… a special kind of cringe. Seriously, the Senate GOP has a full rogues gallery of GOP scatophages, but Ted Cruz is somehow still perhaps the most loathsome guy in there (and that’s saying something). His most flattering quality really is that he resembles the Zodiac Killer. And this insufferable gaslighting tumor on our legislative process has only existed to troll and fundraise off trolling for twelve years, sabotaging American politics from within and whining about somehow being the victim as long as his theocratic take on the country isn’t reality. Ted Cruz already has multiple challengers lined up in a Democratic Primary to take him on in a year’s time, and should he be denied a third term in office, it would probably be something the country could come together to celebrate the way we did when Rick Santorum got sent packing once upon a time. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/3/2203328/-Fanatical-Republican-Extremist-of-the-Day-Ted-Cruz-2023-Update?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/