How Much Does the Media Hate Ted Cruz?

Maybe the writer of this Politico piece was born yesterday, but I wasn’t. See if you can spot the smear:

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who argued nine cases before the Supreme Court as solicitor general of Texas, declared on Friday almost every Democratic nominee to the high court has voted as a “radical leftist nutcase.”

And he said that half of Republican-appointed justices are “screaming trainwreck disasters,” specifically naming Earl Warren, the former chief justice who is best known for authoring the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed segregation but who also earned conservatives ire for running an activist court. (Cruz supports the Brown v. Board decision.)

I know: easy. But if Shane Goldmacher had bothered to ask any conservative with vivid memories of the Warren court, the first thing they would recall would definitely not be Brown v. Board, which was decided unanimously. There is a great deal of conservative ire still directed at Earl Warren’s chief justiceship (“biggest damn fool mistake I ever made,” said Ike), but it has nothing to do with race relations. Rather, it has to do with the court’s liberal opinions concerning apportionment, the rights of criminal defendants (Miranda), the Griswold decision in a contraception case, which discovered a magical “right to privacy,” and, most notoriously, the outlawing of school prayer in Engel v. Vitale. Brown, I would venture to say, was the least controversial of the Warren court’s decisions.

But of course race is the only thing that matters nowadays, and everything must be seen through its baleful prism; if Ted Cruz slams the Warren court, it can only be because he hates black people.