General Discussion

WilliamPitt

(58,179 posts) Thu Sep 26, 2013, 10:13 AM Sep 2013

Green Eggs and Derp

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill
after his speech in Washington, September 25, 2013.
(Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / The New York Times)

Green Eggs and Derp
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout | Op-Ed

Thursday 26 September 2013

"This is like taking a history class from Abbott and Costello."

- Charles P. Pierce, watching Ted Cruz on the Senate floor

Green Eggs and Ham.

A sitting Senator with degrees from Princeton and Harvard, who once announced to his law school classmates that he would only study with graduates of Princeton, Harvard and Yale, came within a hair's breadth of creating a quantum singularity of irony on national television by comprehensively failing to comprehend the moral of a very simple children's story.

Green Eggs and Ham is not a dense tome. Its moral is not impenetrable. One assumes Mr. Cruz grappled with knottier themes and theories during his foray through the Ivy League. And yet there he was, standing on his hind legs like an actual human, thoroughly blowing it for all to see. Americans, he said, "did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare either. They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse."

No. No, no, no, no, no. The point of the story is simplicity refined: how do you know you don't like something if you have not even tried it? That's it, that's all. Since this Dr. Seuss story was first published in 1960, four-year-olds all across the nation and the world have managed to apprehend the depth and breadth of the theory after one single reading. Yet despite all the fancy East Coast learnin' he enjoyed, the world watched the point sail over Mr. Cruz's head, rebound off the far wall, ricochet off Corner Guy, and sail out the window to die a sad, lonely death by drowning in the reflecting pool.

(snip)

He stopped talking after 21 hours, and our short national nightmare was finally over. In the aftermath of the Ted Cruz "filibuster" that wasn't a filibuster - he went to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid hat in hand to get permission to do his little verbal lapdance on himself - absolutely, positively nothing had changed. The votes are still scheduled for later this week, cloture passed 100-0 with Ted's vote included, and you will find a piece of the One True Cross before you find a Senate Democrat willing to defund the president's health care law or give Mr. Cruz the 60-vote threshold he seeks.

It was, in the end, nothing more or less than a day-long fundraising pitch to the wing of the Republican Party that vacuums quarters up from between their couch cushions to send to any officeholder who feeds their rabid anti-Obama jones. These are the same people who have been getting pumped by the party for their pocket change for decades with images of Hillary Clinton and fetuses, brown people crossing the border, Jesus, and ATF agents grabbing guns. These people have been the useful idiots of the GOP for years now, a reliable cash cow so long as they hear what they want to hear within their Fox-fed bubble, and Ted Cruz is now their new avatar.

Yet for that same Republican Party that has done so very well for so very long feeding the ignorance and hatred of its base, the Ted Cruz fraudabuster has become a moment of truth. No one in their right mind thinks that speech was anything other than a colossal humiliation of not only the speech-giver, but of the party he purports to represent. It is not every day that the troll under the bridge broaches the broad daylight and sprays his derangement into the air for all to see and hear, but there was Ted with his bare face hanging out, giving a clinic on just how preposterous the modern Republican Party has allowed itself to become.

The rest: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19066-green-eggs-and-derp