I see this morning that our friends at Mother Jones have entered their bid to write the definitive Ted Cruz asshole florilegium (TCAF). Here it is. It does lean heavily on recent congressional haters of Ted Cruz. But in fairness it also does go back into the pre-Senate, law school and collegiate days. Here at TPM we’ve opted for an iterative approach, in part because this is our traditional mode of coverage but also because of skepticism about whether, like topics such as ‘democracy’ or ‘modernism’, the literature may simply be too vast to be captured in any single monographic treatment.
For instance, last week we looked not directly at testimonials to Cruz’s assholedom but the number of top Republicans who hate Cruz so much that they have been driven to support Donald Trump, in some ways the most telling metric against which to judge levels of Cruz-hate.
Of course, I would not be fair to myself if I didn’t mention the first person oral history I produced in September 2013 looking at the still fresh memories of many of Cruz’s college and law school roommates who appear to have universally regarded Ted as an odious weasel and horrible person. More recently I looked at the debate battle between Trump and Cruz, two long time students of the arts of bullying and assholery, of which Trump got the better part.
As I said, I doubt there can really be any final or complete compilation or discussion of this issue, any more than we’ll ever have a final description or interpretation of the American Revolution or the origins of World War II.
