What’s the difference between House Representative Ted Cruz and a weaseling, lying, self-promoting opportunist of a small, rural town shyster on the make? Cruz got elected into the House. What other difference is there, except he came from Canada and fakes being ardently evangelical, likely a fundamentalist Christian? (No sensible person can actually be a fundamentalist.) A major pretender to a presidential bid? Not likely. The main chance for him is donated money. He’s cashing in, big time, while while the grass stays green. Later, who knows what? He seems to play the home crowd better than he works a banquet room full of sophisticated politicians.
Not all the newer House members are as sophisticated as Cruz. The word sophisticated, a few centuries ago, meant the beer was adulterated with sugar, bringing a big fine on the polluter of a town’s sacred beverage. Honest truthfulness and circumspect purview of the national scene amounts to the sacred bond we require of people in government.
Alas, power corrupts, today, because corruption empowers.
So, the last folks from whom to expect such bona-fide bond-ability are those religious frauds who are too shallow to grasp their own fakery. Educated professional lawyer though Cruz may be, well-dressed, smooth-talking grandstander that he is, he is low grade ore in the metals of mentality. Why? Because the right stuff requires not just mind but heart and humane imagination integrated with profoundly understood morality, as well. Sadly, despicable specimens abound on the loudly wrong, radical right-wing, today. No, there’s no monopoly over there, just a notable majority of that gang-like minority tea party within the minority Republican party.
Cruz has sided with the tiny fraction of one-percent Americans who think they amount to one-hundred-and-fifty percent, the real Americans as distinct from the immensely more numerous masses of people high or low who “drift blindly toward SOCIALism.” You would think those smaller masses of people under sway or fealty to that tin-hatted faction could smell the coffee up there on high, drifting down to them from the good life of the plutocrats. One wonders if top and bottom of that rubber-stretching food-chain are not exclusively entertained by visions of reality survival shows on TV — a menage of rugged individualists, thrown together on an island, each of whom doesn’t give a skit for the others unless they’re unmistakably aiding the rugged ones’ survival by contract.
Confidence operators like Cruz are a disease on urban civilization. They can be exposed but never eradicated because they rise from complacent parents who assume the best of their offspring without carefully attending to their development past the parents’ or mentors’ often-deficient, character and social image . Few of us grow up in community large enough to say we reflect a whole nation or its highest quality culture. Personality reflects culture. Where culture is thin or poorly transmitted to a new generation, kids often, though not always, reflect back that shallow narrowness or twist. Legal torts and crimes both defined by law and undefined flow early from those short-comings. Many politicians remind us of Huck Finn’s “King and Duke” floating downriver on the raft.
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