Ted Cruz: Intellectual Intellectual

[Content note: Islamophobia, homophobia]

You may have heard that Ted Cruz (who is horrible) recently won the GOP primary to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas in the Senate. You may also have heard of David Brooks (who is also horrible). Here are some things Cruz has said, juxtaposed with some things Brooks said last Friday on NPR.

Cruz: "Agenda 21 attempts to abolish 'unsustainable' environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind."

Brooks: "He will do and I think what a lot of these [recently elected Tea Party Congresspeople] will do, will put a very deep and pretty intellectually substantive and very Madisonian approach."

Cruz: "Sharia law is an enormous problem [in the United States]."

Brooks: "[These Tea Party Congresspeople] are going to be a very intellectually serious force with deep and firmly held sort of intellectual roots for a long time."

Cruz: "When the mayor of a city chooses twice to march in a parade celebrating gay pride, that's a statement. It's not a statement I believe in".

Brooks: "He's sort of a product of sort of the conservative, if you want to put it, Madisonian tradition, which is very, very small government, but a pretty deep intellectual tradition."

It's like James Madison said: "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Horatio."

I shit you not, were I not a regular Brooks watcher, I probably would have, in a state of shock and horror, driven my rusty 2002 Saturn into the Jell-O section of the local supermarket. Intellectual? For realz? That's when I decided to write this blog post.

A funny thing happened on my way to the Internet. I started doing some research (on the Internet, but that was a damn good line SO HUSH) on Ted Cruz. It turns out that pretty much everybody (by which I mean most conservative blowhards*) was proclaiming the, um, intellectualosity of Cruz's intellect.

Robert P. George, Cruz’s college advisor [AT PRINCETON] told the New York Times that the presumptative US Senator and budding conspiracy theorist was “intellectually and morally serious.” I grabbed this quote out of a NYT piece titled "A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle and Intellectual Heft."

I know you're wondering what Alan Dershowitz thinks. According to this National Review cover story, he recalls that “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.” Now you know.

I could go on, but nobody (and I mean nobody) wants to see me quote George Will.

In case you have a short attention span:

Cruz: "Sharia law is an enormous problem [in the United States]."

I don't really care if Cruz is "an intellectual" or not. He's a small-minded bigot. Of course, he could be a disingeous asshole who's only pretending to be a bigot in order to get elected and enact a disasterous agenda. That's certainly, um, impressive.

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*It's still not Adam and Horatio.