Micah Walter/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. Cruz has been casting stones since he first moved into his Senate offices nine months ago. His quarry is bottomless. Let us not soon forget the hearings into Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as secretary of defense, when Cruz wondered aloud whether Hagel had taken honorariums from countries hostile to the United States. This insinuation was groundless and shameless, but it paid off, in a fashion. A newcomer to the Senate, Cruz was the dark star of the proceedings. A brute was born. He went on to pelt Dianne Feinstein, a Senate elder whom he condescendingly lectured about the Constitution. And there were yet more stones for his Republican colleagues, whom he dismissed as “squishes.” It matters not if you are foe or friend: if Cruz can besmirch you in a manner that bolsters his purer-than-thou, blunter-than-thou, braver-than-thou pose, brace yourself. This week he is blithely putting the lawmakers in his party between a rock and a hard place. If they fail to match the anti-Obamacare passion that he flexed anew in a Senate speech Monday, they’ll land on the far right’s watch list. But if they match it and the government shuts down, there’s a good chance that the Republican Party takes the blame and a hit it can ill afford. A Harvard Law School roommate of Cruz’s told Zengerle that Cruz refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergraduate at Harvard, Princeton or Yale. His own notoriety is cemented. He won’t be a hero to many, but to the few who see him that way, he’ll be a veritable monument. Which seems to match how he regards himself. “He has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right — in both senses of the word — than pretty much everyone else in our nation’s capital,” writes Jason Zengerle in a profile of Cruz in the new issue of GQ. That’s not just a skeptical journalist’s take. That’s many exasperated Republicans’ assessment of Cruz, too. “They’re on a different planet,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, said last week.
– Ted Cruz is taking the "fast track" to Senate stardom, and that means capitalizing on conflict, writes Frank Bruni in the New York Times. He hasn't been around long, but he's already made "groundless and shameless" accusations against Chuck Hagel, offered Dianne Feinstein some constitutional pedantry, and even slapped fellow Republicans as "squishes." His stand against ObamaCare is forcing GOPers either to call for a government shutdown—likely hurting the party—or risk getting a place "on the far right’s watch list." What's more, his strategy won't get him far (even if it makes headlines) because successful politicians have to be likeable, whereas Cruz is "grandstanding and bloviating his way to obsolescence," Bruni writes. In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank agrees that Cruz is all about ambition—but he says Republicans like Cruz aren't risking their necks in the shutdown debate. In fact, they're "doing what’s necessary to survive in a political system gone mad." Thanks in large part to district mapping, few GOP House seats are "even marginally competitive," and conservative-dominated primaries are the only threat. So to keep their jobs, lawmakers have no choice but to take a Cruz-like path. Click for Milbank's full piece or for Bruni's.