Cruz Missile

A Harvard education isn’t what it used to be, if Senator Ted Cruz is the yardstick of that fabled institution’s efficacy. How can a Harvard law school graduate say so many outrageous and stupid things? More astonishing is that anyone takes Cruz seriously, though the hacks in the mainstream media hang on his every whacky pronouncement, and the big network talking heads have already determined that crazy Cruz is definitely presidential material.

It’s possible, I suppose, that Senator Cruz really believes the crap that pours from his mouth, but it’s more likely that he is simply the latest in a long line of ambitious politicians who will say and do anything to grab and hold power. 

The American political landscape is like Chemical Alley down in Louisiana – a deep cesspool of toxic chemicals that is slowly killing everyone who comes into contact with it.

The extremists in Congress want to defund the Affordable Care Act, and in order to accomplish this perverse objective they are willing to cripple the entire federal government. Obstruction and destruction is what passes for politics in this country now.

Are things any better on the vast frontier of the American empire? Not really. American drones still hover over the tribal areas of Pakistan, and American soldiers continue to chase shadows in the hills and valleys of Afghanistan. Our failed colonial experiment in Iraq left that nation wrecked, unstable and dangerous. ABC News reports that “Iran is America’s most formidable adversary,” keeping alive the shibboleth that Iran is the next Bogeyman that must be contained, confronted and conquered. American military outposts may surround Iran, and Iran may live in the same neighborhood with nuclear-equipped Israel, but Iran is the dangerous nation with nuclear ambitions that must be checked.   

But getting back to Ted Cruz…I wonder if what Cruz and his Tea Bagger followers are really afraid of is that the Affordable Care Act might work, in the same way Medicare and Social Security have worked for generations of Americans. Cruz and Co. believe in market solutions to every problem, not government programs, and if the Affordable Care Act succeeds in making it possible for more Americans to gain and keep medical insurance coverage -- and slows the increase in the cost of care -- it might undermine their ideological certainty that the free market is the only solution to social problems.

But what do I know? I’m just an average citizen watching this nutty spectacle from afar. To me Washington D.C. is like a giant lunatic asylum where the padded doors have been ripped from their hinges, freeing the inmates to run wild in the corridors and recreation room, loot the infirmary, and smash every window in the institution. When the crazed ideologues find the matches and the gasoline they will burn the place to the ground – in the name of liberty for the American people, of course.

I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating: Hunter S. Thompson was right -- we are locked in a downward spiral of dumbness.