The after-hours drinks were always on him, and the boozy, privately affable Sen. Joe McCarthy was genuinely surprised whenever rebuffed by indignant reporters. Come on, guys, don't you get it? Mine is a schtick, he'd implicitly concede. I don't really believe all this communists-everywhere crap. It's a game, a little pick-me-up needed for reelection. Come on, it's just politics.
Such was the elastic personality of, some say, America's greatest demagogue. He could turn the bile off or on, depending entirely on circumstances (just as Huey Long would prattle like a Harvard lawyer in the presence of sophisticated colleagues but drawl like an unschooled bumpkin when back in the bayou). And the only ones who didn't "get it" were his true believers and idealistic opponents.
Thus McCarthy's fellow senators got it.
All successful pols have at least a touch of Joe McCarthy in them. But they respect those inviolable if indefinable boundaries of even demagogic decency, to which the spontaneously reckless or excessively clever personality seems insensible. And in the senatorial case of McCarthy, the former met up with the latter in the career-ending form of censure.
Welcome, Ted Cruz, to your future.
Good question. He's a little large for a hand basket but perhaps in smaller pieces and more trips.
Posted by: Peter G | February 16, 2013 at 01:24 PM
But, Peter, who's gonna cut him down to size?
Posted by: Janicket | February 16, 2013 at 02:26 PM
With his fancy education and condescending, bullying tactics, Ted Cruz seems to be everything that the right used to and still does accuse the left of being.
Posted by: AnneJ | February 16, 2013 at 02:37 PM
Personal experience has taught me Janicket, that such people have a way of disintegrating themselves. Then it's just a matter of contracting out to a capable transportation company.
Posted by: Peter G | February 16, 2013 at 04:24 PM
Ted Cruz is the Carnival Cruise of Senators -- toxic and full of shit.
Posted by: Anonymous | February 16, 2013 at 06:09 PM