Cruz Out of Control

Is it just me, or is Ted Cruz the most transparently cynical politician on planet Earth?

In the interest of charity, let’s say it’s just me.  After all, there are plenty of cynical people in politics, and picking out the cynical-est of them all is a bit like choosing which Oscar nominee is the most Caucasian:  In the end, why not just call it a tie?

Yet it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, even among the most craven of presidential contenders, the junior senator from Texas is in a league all his own.  While this has been true from the moment he appeared on the scene, his steady ascension in the polls has made his abject wretchedness a matter of national concern.

Indeed, the sheer chutzpah infused in every sentence that comes out of Cruz’s mouth is a wonder to behold, as you realize we’re dealing with someone who will say and do just about anything to become the next Republican nominee—and, presumably, the next president—and who apparently has no understanding of the word “shame.”

If we wanted to be succinct about this, we could merely cite his recent Duck Dynasty-themed TV ad and call it a day.  (Seriously, how many hours were devoted to that face paint?)  Or we could revisit that time he cooked bacon by wrapping it around the muzzle of a machine gun and firing away.  (No, dear reader, that moment was not a hallucination.)

Truly, in the realm of primary season pandering, Cruz is a visionary and a prophet.  You sense that if he could win 15 more votes by skinning a live raccoon and wearing its carcass as a hat, he would do so without a moment’s pause—with a big, fat smile on his face.

Which brings us to the $1.6 billion question:  Is Ted Cruz as stupid as he looks?

Answer:  Absolutely not.  A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law and a nationally-recognized debater at both, Cruz is arguably the most intellectually formidable person in the GOP field, capable of processing complex ideas in ways that most other public figures don’t even attempt.  If you’re a Republican voter who values smarts above all else, Ted is most assuredly your man.

Herein lies the paradox and the punch line, which is that Cruz’s long-term electoral success depends almost entirely on garnering the support of idiots—folks who, at best, don’t give a rat’s ass about a fancy Ivy League education and, at worst, are openly contemptuous of those who have one.

Cruz understands as well as anybody that his only hope of winning the nomination is by pretending to be a total dunderhead, and damned if he isn’t giving it the old college try.  He is not going to let a little thing like dignity get in the way of becoming the most powerful man on Earth.

In this sense, Cruz doesn’t employ cynicism so much as he embodies it.  While the word “cynicism” has been used rather haphazardly in our public discourse over the years, it can best be defined here as purposefully saying something false in the understanding that your audience is too dumb to know the difference.

Up to now, Donald Trump’s birtherism has arguably been the gold standard on this front.  From the beginning, Trump knew perfectly well that Barack Obama was born in the United States and was constitutionally qualified to be president.  And yet, once he made the calculation (rather brilliantly, I must say) that there were enough ignorant rubes with whom he could build a base of support for his eventual foray into politics, he embraced the “Obama was secretly born in Kenya” conspiracy theory whole hog and—presto chango!—he is now the most popular Republican in U.S. politics.

Into this deranged, noxious atmosphere, Ted Cruz materialized last fall with possibly the most cynical public pose of all:  Embracing Trump as a swell guy with a lot of really good points.

Recall, if you will, that while Trump was inexplicably rising in stature with one galling, infantile comment after another, all of his GOP counterparts denounced and distanced themselves from him—except for Ted Cruz.  As Trump was called a “blowhard” by Jeb Bush and a “buffoon” by Rand Paul, Cruz all but linked arms with the Donald, insisting that the latter had his finger to the GOP winds and should not be so quickly discounted as some kind of unhinged carnival barker (thank you, Martin O’Malley).

Politically, it was a bold move for Cruz to align himself with a man with no apparent moral compass—someone willing to alienate virtually every racial and ethnic group in America as a means of taking over the GOP.  Like Trump himself, Cruz wagered that there were enough bigots and paranoids in the electorate to comprise a plurality of Republican primary voters, and that if those fine, upstanding citizens ever soured on Trump, why shouldn’t Cruz position himself as their next-best bet?

It seemed like an insane gambit at the time:  Trump was clearly a disaster waiting to happen and who in his right mind would tag along with that?

As it turned out—in a predictably unpredictable manner—Cruz’s low opinion of Republican voters proved 100 percent accurate, and he has benefitted from their credulity every step of the way.  While Trump remains as admired as ever, Cruz is in the best possible position to absorb Trump voters in the event of a flameout.  For Cruz, short of actually being in the lead, everything has gone precisely according to plan.

In the past few days, of course, all hell has broken loose as the unofficial détente between Trump and Cruz has officially come to an end.  Suddenly vulnerable, Trump has begun treating Cruz as disrespectfully as all his other rivals, while Cruz has finally—finally!—hinted as to what he really thinks about his party’s bully-in-chief.

While I haven’t the slightest idea how the average Republican primary voter is taking this drastic turn of events, I think I speak for most leftists and other non-Republicans in calling this the most entertaining clash of the entire 2016 race.  All presidential campaigning is crack to political junkies, but Trump v. Cruz is a veritable eight ball of excitement, and it’s going to produce one hell of a hangover when all is said and done.

Why is this fight different from all other fights?  Easy:  Because neither fighter has the slightest shred of integrity or self-awareness and—perhaps not coincidentally—both are born showmen and narcissists concerned with the fortunes of no one but themselves.

To wit:  When Trump was exchanging insults with, say, Jeb Bush, the tiff was implicitly a battle between lunacy and reason, with Bush assuming the mantle of the latter as an antidote to the former.

Against Cruz, the rules of engagement have managed to achieve an added level of ridiculousness, as neither man has the faintest interest in moderation, decorum or intellectual coherence.  By every known account, Ted Cruz is the most personally unpleasant member of the U.S. Senate, particularly among those in his own party.  It might seem odd that a man of such intelligence and education would be so detested by his fellow Republicans—that is, until you realize that he channels every modicum of his rhetorical gifts to advance his own selfish interests (read:  being elected president), often in the most heavy-handed and theatrical way possible.

Indeed, we can’t know whether Cruz means a word of what he says, because—much like Trump—every syllable is uttered entirely for effect, without regard for the consequences of turning those words into actions.

Lately, for instance, Cruz has mused about “carpet bomb[ing] ISIS into oblivion,” partly to find out “if sand can glow in the dark.”  While we have all expressed such sentiments about how we would personally handle terrorism—typically in a college dorm at 4 o’clock in the morning after 10 or 12 drinks—to hear a sober grown-up say them in the middle of the afternoon—well, it’s a bit like those closet cases who are little too effusive about how much they love women.  There is a whiff of phoniness and overcompensation in the air.

Except that doesn’t matter with Cruz, because his target audience is precisely the sort of gang that eats that stuff up and thinks all problems can be solved with apocalyptic violence.  Since Trump’s attitude on this is virtually identical to Cruz’s (on ISIS:  “I would bomb the shit out of them”), their matchup is destined to be the most childish, petty and substance-free contest in memory, and there may not be enough popcorn to get us through it.  (At least not after we leave Iowa.)

It was Andrew Sullivan in 2009 who said the Republican Party would get worse before it gets better, but I think even he didn’t foresee just how completely the GOP would disintegrate into nihilism and self-parody.  How even its highest-achieving thinkers would appeal to the lowest common denominator.

At that point, you’ll recall, Sarah Palin was the party’s great shining star—an ideological demagogue who, on the basis of her syntax, was every bit as dumb as she appeared.  How interesting, then, that the current war for the nomination is between two demagogues who, by their backgrounds, are perfectly capable of enlightened, serious leadership but, because of what their party has become, have no plausible route to success except through cynicism and bombast.

Fasten your seatbelts, citizens.  It’s gonna be a bumpy year.

The Entertainer

Quick question:  Is there is any meaningful difference between Sarah Palin and Donald Trump?

There are probably a few distinctions worth mentioning.  Several billion dollars in net worth, for one.  Palin is (or was) a career politician, while Trump has never been elected to anything.  Palin has held unyieldingly conservative views her entire adult life, while Trump has oscillated back and forth as it has suited him.  Palin stars in reality TV shows, while Trump only hosts them.

On the whole, however, I am increasingly finding the two Republican stars interchangeable.  The longer our present Trump hysteria persists, the more it conjures déjà vu for that period in 2008 when, thanks to John McCain, America was presented with a singular political phenomenon it could not ignore, however hard it tried.

Specifically, I have decided to approach the Trump question as comedian Lewis Black approached Palin.  Asked in 2010 about his estimation of the one-time Alaska governor, Black quipped, “What I believe is she’s actually not real.  That’s the only way my mind can deal with it, that she’s a fiction character come to life.”

Sounds about right to me.

Donald Trump may technically be a living, breathing human being—in possession of some semblance of a heart and brain—but to the tens of millions of us observing the presidential race from our respective couches, he is, for all intents and purposes, a cartoon character.  A TV-based caricature whose presence has no relationship to reality and who will never, ever, ever be elected president.

This has been true from the moment in 2011 when Trump, disposing of whatever dignity he had left, publicly converted to Birtherism by expressing doubt as to whether President Obama was born in the United States.  Then, none of us actually took his rantings seriously, but we happily imbibed them nonetheless, because, hey, we all need to indulge our guilty pleasures now and then.

Now, of course, the circumstances are slightly different, insomuch as Trump is running for president and is currently the highest-polling candidate in the Republican primary field.

But here’s the weird thing:  We still don’t take him seriously.

If I may be allowed a prediction:  Should he win the nomination, we won’t take him seriously then, either.

And if he is elected president?  To quote Basil Fawlty:  “We’ll worry about that when we come to it, shall we?”

Of course he won’t win the nomination, let alone the keys to Air Force One.  Up to now, his candidacy has been built on a foundation of sheer chutzpah, blissfully bereft of anything in the way of policy prescriptions, intellectual maturity or basic ideological coherence.  While plenty of candidates have succeeded with one or other of those characteristics, Trump would be the first to pull off the hat trick.

But he won’t, because sooner or later, the utter ridiculousness of his existence will cease being a mixture of hilarious and appalling and be merely appalling, and his whole act will just plain get old.  Sure, in the future he may experiment with actual legislative proposals—launching a drone war against China, perhaps?—but there is little evidence that this would have much effect on his core fans, who seem perfectly content with the substance-free specimen they have now.

A word about those supporters.

In most recent opinion polls, Trump is gobbling up endorsements from 20-25 percent of registered Republican voters—more than any of his competitors by far.

But let us realize how insignificant this data point actually is.  According to Gallop, 23 percent of Americans today identify as Republicans.  (Democrats are 28 percent and independents are 46 percent.)  While it is certainly impressive for anyone to carry 25 percent support in a 17-person field, when we talk about one-fourth of GOP voters, we are only talking about one-fourth of one-fourth of the total American electorate.

Which means—if my calculations are correct—that, for all our shock and awe at Trump’s supposedly amazing popularity, the enthusiasm in question is felt by little more than one-sixteenth of all American voters—an amount that would be negligible if it referred to any other subject about which pollsters might bother to inquire.

We might refer to Trump supporters as a fringe group.  Statistically-speaking, they are.  Indeed, their number is less than half the percentage of those who currently approve of the U.S. Congress.  (Presumably there is minimal overlap between the two.)

So when we—and especially our media—continue to treat this cretin as if he were a legitimate political figure, we are just being lazy, selfish hedonists.

We follow Trump’s antics for the same reason we eat junk food:  Because it provides a temporary rush of pure primal pleasure, followed by a crushing sense of shame, guilt and emptiness, which in turn can only be cured with…more junk food!

No one in the journalism profession genuinely thinks Trump is worth covering.  They cover him anyway—and we tune in—because of how morally superior it makes us feel.  We see a grown man behaving like a petulant child and we think, “Well, I may not be rich or famous, but at least I’m not a complete jerk.”

Trump’s campaign has nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with distracting ourselves from the deadly serious matters that, sooner or later, we will have to confront for real.

For now, it’s all one giant freak show, and—you know what?—we might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

In a priceless new Rolling Stone  article titled, “Inside the GOP Clown Car,” Matt Taibbi argues that we probably shouldn’t be so flippant and blasé about Trump’s total media saturation, since its perpetuation could lead, in Taibbi’s words, to “the collapse of the United States as a global superpower.”  Not to mention the generally poisonous atmosphere that his comments about women and immigrants have unleashed.

I see very little to worry about.  The environment that Trump hath wrought is ugly now, but it will pass soon enough, and equilibrium will return to our system as it always does.

I began with a comparison to Sarah Palin because I think her own character arc is instructive here.

As you’ll recall, Palin totally shook up the 2008 race when she landed on the underside of the GOP ticket, galvanizing Republican voters with passionate speeches, snappy one-liners and her inspiring, wholesome family.

And then she lost the election by 8 ½ million votes, quit her job and was forever lampooned by Tina Fey and others because—oh, that’s right—she is a total flippin’ idiot.

Palin’s status as an unqualified clown is bleeding obvious to us now, but she made quite a mess before we finally, collectively, decided to treat her like the reality TV sideshow that she is.

With Trump, there are no ambiguities whatsoever.  We know exactly how absurd he is—it’s confirmed every time he opens his mouth—and if he remains a role model for a plurality of Republican voters then, well, that’s because they’re absurd, too.

The party will eventually snap out of it, if only out of self-preservation.  In our lifetimes, neither the Democrats nor Republicans have nominated a candidate so transparently unelectable who, all the while, held no particular political views and was openly detested by virtually every other official in his own party.

Naturally, Democrats are rooting for exactly that, and the liberal media have every reason to keep pretending that this man is a real story.

If I were a Republican voter, I would be horrified by this sordid state of affairs.  As it stands, I can’t imagine being more thankful that I’m not.

That is, unless the Donald somehow secures the nomination and selects a certain former Alaska governor as his running mate.

Can You Keep a Secret?

Sometimes everything works out exactly as it should.  At my folks’ house on Sunday, everything did.

You see, my dear old dad had a big birthday this week, so the rest of us threw him a surprise party over the weekend.  The idea was hatched sometime around Thanksgiving, plans were finalized in the first week of February, and my mom and I acted as principal planners and co-conspirators all along the way.

This being the first surprise party in which I played a significant role, it proved a novel and enlightening experience in the fine art of duplicity.

All told, somewhere north of 60 people were invited, then promptly commanded to zip their mouths shut.  We took care to meticulously choreograph the birthday boy’s schedule without him realizing it, while also devising a strategy for handling the many things that could go wrong.  Not to mention the dizzying prep work of preparing and ordering (and hiding) all the food and decorations, and then only having an hour or so to set them all up.

With all the moving parts that were involved, it was quite impressive that our diabolical plot went off without a hitch.  Nobody spilled the beans, everyone arrived on time.  Even Mother Nature cooperated, for a change.  The guest of honor was surprised and delighted, and a good time was had by all.

As a group, we proved wholly up to the task of carrying on an open deception for an extended period of time and executing the final “reveal” with clockwork efficiency.

Indeed, so good were we at pulling off this playful con, I wonder if we didn’t miss our calling to work for the feds in Washington, D.C.

As everyone knows, whenever disgruntled American citizens are not condemning their government for being lazy, incompetent and generally feckless, they are accusing it of conducting secret, evil grand plots of near-superhuman ingenuity.

The Kennedy assassination.  The Moon landing.  The September 11 attacks.  President Obama’s birth.  Conspiracy theorists contend that none of these events occurred as the official record says.  Rather, they were somehow staged, altered or otherwise effected by elements of the American government for one nefarious purpose or other, and done in the utmost secrecy so that no one, to this day, has any smoking gun evidence to prove any of them.

While not all government-related conspiracy theories are created equal, and some have even proved correct—what else would you call Watergate?—there is an inherently low probability that any such plot is real, precisely because of how unlikely it would be for that many people to be entrusted to such a titanic secret, and then for all of them to keep quiet after all these years.

No, what actually happens is exactly what you would expect.  Whenever some governmental entity attempts to pull something over on the American people—particularly with a high number of agents involved—not all of the holes get plugged, and eventually, something or somebody cracks.  Watergate is a classic illustration, but so, too, is the ridiculous plan by the Christie administration and the Port Authority to inflict gridlock on the George Washington Bridge.  Sure, the truth of these schemes was kept under wraps for a certain amount of time.  But then one day, it wasn’t.

The thing about a surprise party is that the period of secret-keeping is finite:  You only need to clam up until the actual party occurs.  After that, you can relax and congratulate yourself on a job well done.  As well, revelers are given only so much advance notice, lowering the probability that someone’s guard will drop.

To wit:  It’s entirely possible for 60 people to stay tight-lipped for a month, as my family proved last weekend.  But what if we gave our guests a full six months’ or a year’s warning?  Would the surprise still have succeeded?  We certainly weren’t prepared to take that risk.

If we might reduce all of this to a general formula, it would be that the probability of a conspiracy remaining a secret is inversely proportional to the number of people involved, as well as to the amount of time elapsed since the conspiracy formally commenced.

If this seems all too obvious, it is nonetheless an essential insight into why conspiracy theories at the highest levels of government tend to be so idiotic, and why they should be taken with multiple grains of salt.

In the long run, human beings in large numbers are just not that great at keeping secrets.  Sooner or later, somebody blows the whistle or sends an incriminating e-mail or tweet.  Whether by accident or by design, some people just can’t help themselves.

Not every conspiracy can be as top secret as a birthday party for your dad.

Not Just a Theory

One must never let the facts get in the way of a perfectly good conspiracy theory.

Yet I must confess that, on the matter of the Kennedy assassination, I have done exactly that.

My experience with the notion that President John F. Kennedy was not killed by a single person acting on his own began (boringly enough) with Oliver Stone.  Viewing his 1991 film JFK for the first time (and then a second and a third), I was mesmerized by the web of intrigue that surrounded the late president’s death.

At the very least, the movie suggested that whether Kennedy really had been killed as part of a grand plot, there is a trove of information to illustrate why the idea exists.

Mind you, in the many years during which I counted myself among JFK conspiracy cooks, I never clung to any particular narrative.  Whether the president had been done in by the mob, the CIA, Fidel Castro, extreme right-wingers, extreme left-wingers, or all of the above—that was beside the point.

For me, the case was a simple matter of forensics:  Early analysis of Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination concluded the shooting took place in a span of 5.6 seconds, which is simply not enough time for a single person to fire three separate shots with the rifle Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used.  By definition, that means there were at least two shooters and that the killing was therefore a conspiracy of one kind or another.

Then some time later, I came upon a documentary, “Beyond Conspiracy,” aired on ABC in 2003, which noted that subsequent and more sophisticated examinations of the Zapruder film have established that—oops!—the actual time frame of the three shots is 8.4 seconds—more than enough for someone with Oswald’s background and training.

Since I had based my conspiratorial musings entirely on this one statistic, and since the statistic had now been proved incorrect, I saw no compelling reason to carry on with my investigations and I have suited up with Team Lone Gunman ever since.

Neat, huh?

On this 50^th anniversary of that dark day in Dallas, I wish to contest a commonly-held perception about conspiracy buffs—namely, that they are stubbornly irrational creatures who are impervious to facts and data that might disprove their darkest convictions about how the world really works.

Historically speaking, this assumption is entirely correct, except when it’s not.

For instance:  When a wave of paranoia about President Barack Obama’s place of birth crested a few years back, the basis of the claim that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, was the lack of a birth certificate to prove otherwise.

When the president produced such a document, the controversy should have ended right there.  Yet the howls of protest continued from some corners of the Internet, with “birther” holdouts proceeding to concoct ever more elaborate explanations for how the objective truth was neither objective nor truthful.

However, this was not universally the case.  For every person who did not listen to reason, there were many more who did.

In a Gallop poll conducted in the first week of May 2011—several days after Obama’s “long form” birth certificate was made public—13 percent of respondents asserted the president was “definitely” or “probably” born in a foreign country.  In an identical survey two weeks prior—that is, when the birth certificate had yet to be seen—the number was 24 percent.

In other words, the size of the “birther” pool was cut nearly in half by a simple disclosure of fact.  For a sizable minority of the public, the conviction that the president was not born in the United States was, it turned out, susceptible to basic logic:  They asked for proof, they received proof, they accepted it and they moved on.  Presto.

I wish the size of this minority were bigger, and that there weren’t such a large gang of reliable idiots whose paranoia overwhelms all their other mental capacities.  The latter makes the former look bad, and that’s a shame.  We need honest skeptics in this society, because sometimes their instincts are right.

The JFK conspiracy theories might be hooey, but some conspiracies are real.  (The Lincoln assassination is one.)  We must take care to recognize this, and to differentiate between the two.

To assume nothing is a conspiracy is no less reckless than to assume everything is a conspiracy.  One generalizes at one’s peril.

The key, as with so much else, is to be all the time led by the facts and the evidence, and not by the lack thereof.