The Hollow Man

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Hot Gas:

For 26 years, Rush Lim­baugh has insisted that con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues, clearly and pas­sion­ately artic­u­lated, will win every time. By con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues Rush meant: God, coun­try, fam­ily, com­mu­nity, lib­erty, indi­vid­u­al­ism, per­sonal respon­si­bil­ity, lim­ited gov­ern­ment, and free mar­kets. Rea­gan was the model, and the promise: it had hap­pened once, and could hap­pen again.

 

Eas­ier said than done.

Year after year, can­di­date after can­di­date mouthed the plat­i­tudes, and botched the exe­cu­tion. They could over­come nei­ther the oppo­si­tion, their own estab­lish­ment, or per­sonal foibles. Yet year after year, fail­ure after fail­ure, Rush kept the faith, exhort­ing, cajol­ing, com­fort­ing, and dream­ing of the per­fect can­di­date.

In 2012, that can­di­date arrived on the national scene; and in 2016 he ran for Pres­i­dent. Bril­liant, artic­u­late, prin­ci­pled, and tough, Ted Cruz couldn’t have been more per­fect had Lim­baugh molded him out of clay. Unlike the breath­less ingénue Marco Rubio, who is so scripted you can see the hand in his back, Cruz was the real deal. Seem­ingly impreg­nable, Cruz over­came tremen­dous oppo­si­tion, and sev­eral of his own mis­steps, to become a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge to the cur­rent front-runner, Don­ald Trump.

 

But Neme­sis will have his day. In clas­si­cal Greek tragedy, the pro­tag­o­nist is brought down by his own flaws. For the Greeks this was fate; it could not be oth­er­wise. For us, it is the result of choice; every man, high and low, must make choices as he is con­fronted by cir­cum­stance. Some­times those choices are mon­u­men­tal, and some­times they destroy us. In order to avoid calamity, we must be self-aware enough to see how our own flaws are influ­enc­ing our choices.

 

For Ted Cruz, the cen­tral flaw is a malig­nant nar­cis­sism that erupts into con­de­scen­sion, intel­lec­tual arro­gance, and a sense of inevitabil­ity. He is no longer car­ry­ing the mes­sage; he is the mes­sage. That atti­tude, of course, leads to the mes­sage get­ting lost, as prin­ci­ple after prin­ci­ple is sac­ri­ficed to get the man into office, because that is all that mat­ters.

 

As the desire for power has swamped him like a tidal wave of sew­er­age, Ted Cruz has allowed GOP Inc. to hol­low him out like they’ve hol­lowed out the Amer­i­can econ­omy. I never liked Ted Cruz, but I admired him, because once he laid down a posi­tion, he stuck to it.

 

Those days are gone. Con­fronted by the Trump behe­moth, Cruz has adopted Trump’s posi­tions, even as he crit­i­cizes them. The lat­est whop­per is a “tax” on imports, which is noth­ing more than the tar­iff that Cruz claims will wreck the econ­omy. Last debate, between the Al Gore-inspired sighs, Cruz sounded like an ade­noidal Trump robot with the com­edy left out. It was not pretty.

________

 

Getting involved with the snake handlers hasn't helped Cruz, either.