Ted Cruz: Badass

Saw this, but noticed an error. So I wanted to make one thing clear: I don’t smoke cigarettes http://t.co/3nn2740kkP pic.twitter.com/tPFNqg9vu8

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 15, 2014

“See, this is how you handle a situation where somebody’s Photoshopped your head on a tattooed street punk[*] and distributed the posters all over LA. By correcting the record,” Moe Lane writes.

Meanwhile, Jon Gabriel of Ricochet joins in on the Photoshop fun:

Ted Cruz: Badass. http://t.co/MuRFnq4b7M pic.twitter.com/JtVxnxfnLE

— jon gabriel (@exjon) March 15, 2014

And since the original Photoshop appeared because Cruz was to be given the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award at their annual Churchill Dinner on Saturday in L.A., to accompany Roger L. Simon’s post on the topic, I quickly threw this together late last night:

(Original image of Mr. Obama’s Brit Noire with a heater, here.)

As Roger writes:

I leave it to you to decide which is the greater honor, but I was in attendance Saturday night at Claremont’s annual Churchill dinner at the Beverly Wilshire to see Cruz receive his award and, more importantly, deliver a speech.  I was anxious to go because the Texas senator is one of the men of the Republican hour and a darling of the militant wing of the party.  He is also quite clearly a bright fellow, a cum laude graduate of Princeton where he was a national debating champion, then a magnum cum laude grad of Harvard Law where he was called “off-the-charts brilliant” by none other than Alan Dershowitz, who, to my knowledge, has never said quite the same thing  about Obama.  From there the future Texas senator went on to clerk for Chief Justice Rehnquist.

Perhaps even more impressive about Cruz is that he was already studying such free-market economists as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Frederic Bastiat and Ludwig Mises in high school.  Not too many of us could say that.   But if we had, I suspect this country would be a lot different.

My problem with the Texas senator, as I have written previously, has been one of tactics, not ideology.  I was put off, as were a significant portion of the electorate, if we can believe the polls, by his effort to shut down the government over Obamacare, even though that same electorate disdained Obama’s absurd healthcare legislation — or should I say prevarication?  Nevertheless, for a moment, the Republican brand was damaged.  I was worried that it might be fatal.  I was dead wrong.

Interpretations of the government “slimdown” differ, and it’s all academic given the disastrous roll-out of Obamacare, but I think Peter Ingemi of DaTechGuy blog was onto something in October, when he explored how Cruz forced the issue:

If Ted Cruz had not made this fight, when the Obamacare launch came and the problems arose, the media would have talked about how natural such problems were and when Democrats asked to delay implementation it would be sold by the media as not a big deal, the most reasonable thing in the world…

…instead of trying to explain why it’s necessary to delay a law passed by congress, signed by the president and upheld by the supreme court that they were united in defending as inviolate just two weeks ago while comedians across the country laugh at it.

GOP Ted Cruz did this for you, even while you were trying to destroy him.

My exit question for Karl Rove & Company: How many millions of dollars from Big money donors would you have paid to put Democrats up for election in 2014 in such a spot?

As Abraham Lincoln said of Gen. Grant when fighting an earlier war against those who sought to minimize the freedoms of Americans, “I like this man. He fights.”

All of which brings us to: “Anatomy of a [Democrat] Midterm Freakout.”

Related: “Ted Cruz quotes ‘pro-choice’ jerks accurately, is falsely accused of calling them Satan worshippers.” As Jim Treacher writes, “The more they try to get Ted Cruz, the more I wonder what they’re so worried about.”