Smearing Ted Cruz
By Matthew Vadum
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is not disappointing his conservative supporters.
In his first few weeks in the world’s most sclerotic deliberative body, Cruz has already come under intense fire from the Left, and surprisingly, from a few corners in the GOP.
Leftist Obama sycophant Greg Sargent, the Washington Post‘s in-house ideological purity enforcer, confers a kind of credibility on Cruz and those like him by calling them crazy.
Cruz “keeps untold numbers of base voters in a state of perpetual delusion,” Sargent writes. He does this with “the hints about creeping socialism, the suggestions that Dems are anti-American, the notion that Obama’s modest executive actions reveal him as an enemy of the Constitution, etc.”
This tedious hazing of conservatives has become an ingrained ritual in the Senate in recent years. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) have all been targets of smear campaigns as they took their seats.
But the fact that the denunciations of Cruz from both inside and outside the Senate have been so sweeping, so bitter, and so quick to arrive, suggests that the freshman senator is off to an excellent start.
Cruz himself welcomes the Left’s enmity.
