The Lonely Triumph Of Ted Cruz by Charles Pierce

[sinkingfeeling]

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/ted-cruz-filibuster-winner-092513
As of this moment, anyway, Tailgunner Ted Cruz is still talking. He will talk until the rules of the U.S. Senate say he can talk no more. And then he will have to shut his piehole and let the Senate vote, which it will do, and that vote will go against him. And a great many Beltway weisenheimers -- the people now who keep reminding us that this isn't a real filibuster, and Claire McCaskill, who took Cruz to task on the exegesis of Green Eggs And Ham, and Lawrence O'Donnell, World's Smartest Human -- will spend a lot of time mocking the Tailgunner for his doomed and useless exercise. And Ted Cruz will sit down, and he will sit down a winner.


To dismiss this as a dog-and-pony show just because its immediate goals will not be achieved is to miss a very important point. What Ted Cruz is doing is showing the country what the future of American conservatism looks like. That is a future that has been rendered inevitable by the Republican party's shameless refusal to control the wildness at the party's heart, and by the Democratic party's pathetic inability to make the Republican party pay for that refusal. In the glib immediate Beltway reaction to what Cruz is doing, I hear a dangerous similarity to the ridicule heaped on Barry Goldwater after his campaign was crushed in 1964. Nobody was laughing any more in 1980.

[factsarenotfair]

1. I'm not laughing at Ted Cruz.

He's showing us a glimpse of the right wing end game and it is terrifying.

[Doctor_J]

2. No kidding. We have one poster here who continues to believe

that all of these antics are the harbingers of the death of the GOP. His posts all have titles like,

Why Ted Cruz’s Anti-Obamacare Grandstanding Doesn’t Matter At All

and

The Republican Party is Crumbling

and

Ted Cruz’s Filibuster Could Cost Him Millions

I don't get the denial - have these people been in a cave for 20 years?