Tea Party’s great dunce-off: How Ted Cruz is quietly kicking Rand Paul’s butt - By Digby

A little-noticed speech tells all you need to know about the right fringe -- and why Cruz gets it more than Paul

DIGBY

There’s been a lot of chatter recently about certain GOP presidential hopefuls’ religious pilgrimage to Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian palace in Las Vegas to beg for dispensation from the Republican Jewish Coalition and ask for financial support from billionaire Adelson — who promises to spend millions on the person who professes his willingness to outlaw online gambling, unequivocally support Israel and bust unions whenever possible. But another GOP religious mission last week got less notice, though it may be more significant in determining who wins the GOP primary: Senator Ted Cruz traveled to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University and gave what everyone considered to be a fiery sermon about the gathering threat to religious liberty in America.

That address was received much more raptuously than the last time a 2016 presidential hopeful appeared at Liberty U — when Rand Paul made his infamous Wikipedia-lifted “Gattaca” speech – and points up one of the two major battle lines between the two main contenders for the Tea Party primary. In this first skirmish, it is obvious that it’s Cruz who has his finger on the pulse of the Christian Right.

But what’s that got to do with the Tea Party, you might ask? The movement is supposedly kaput, having retreated with its proverbial tail between its legs after Ted Cruz embarrassingly read “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor. And anyway, Liberty U is the Christian Right, not the Tea Party.

But that fundamentally misunderstands what the Tea Party actually is. It’s not a movement, it’s a brand. Or, more specifically, a re-brand that was formed in the wreckage of the Bush administration’s spectacular political flame-out when the True Believers badly needed to distance themselves from the GOP’s failure. It is simply the conservative movement in a tri-corner hat. And that movement, as Ronald Reagan described it, famously sits on a tri-legged stool of traditional values, strong defense and small government. How those issues are emphasized is a matter of the political zeitgeist of a given time.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/04/07/tea_partys_great_dunce_off_how_ted_cruz_is_quietly_kicking_rand_pauls_butt/