Charles P Pierce on Carnival Cruz

OK, so now it's serious. At some level, at least. We have our first gen-u-wine, solid gold, Fox News-approved presidential candidate of the 2016 election. And it's Tailgunner Ted Cruz, the Calgary Stampeder himself, who will be calling shotgun in the Republican clown car at Liberty University in Virginia. This, of course, is the diploma mill founded by the late Jerry Falwell, whose presence in American politics was partly responsible for laying the foundation in those politics that inevitably led to the absurdity of Ted Cruz as a candidate for president.

For myself, I think this is a pretty smooth move. I've always been of the opinion that it's better to get the formal announcement out of the way as soon as you decide to throw yourself into the process. The endless Speculation Primary ends immediately. And the endless Money Primary gets just a touch sanctified. And there's something undeniably open about not engaging in the kabuki process of setting up an "exploratory" committee and doing the Dance of the Seven Veils for the various plutocrats who have sublet our politics. Ted Cruz is now a candidate for the presidency of the United States. Period. So now, we can ask the question honestly?

Is this guy freaking kidding?

Ted Cruz is an extremist fanatic. He represents politics and a vision of government that was out of date in 1860. He is connected, rhetorically for the most part, to the darkest manifestations of the American political Id. And he combines that with a kind of unendurable self-righteousness that has alienated even the other extremist fanatics in the conservative leadership elite. From an early age, Cruz has been taught that he is the hidden golden child of a fundamentalist America redemption. (The source of this messianic self-regard is his father, preacher Rafael Cruz, who is not an extremist. He's simply a lunatic.) His role in the government shutdown in 2013 is still resented by many of his fellow Republicans, especially the comical presumption by which Cruz went behind John Boehner's back—or over his prone and motionless body (opinions vary)—to gin up the fringier denizens of the monkeyhouse.

But that's the Republican party's problem. Our problem is that Cruz's prescriptions for the country set an outward boundary for the right side of the political spectrum that virtually is invisible to anyone to the left of Richard Nixon. That's the starting point for the rest of the Republican field. He's no less bughouse on the Affordable Care Act than he was when he tried to wreck the government over it two years ago. He wants to close the IRS. He is absolutely sure about all the bad ideas he supports. He looks in the mirror and sees more than a statesman. he sees a redeemer.You will be told that the rest of the field constitutes some sort of ill-defined "middle." That's nonsense. This is still the party in which Ted Cruz is considered a serious person because there are enough people in The Base who support him and his retrograde agenda. The 2016 election has begun. The bar is set where you need a metal detector to find it.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a33831/ted-cruz-will-announce-2016-presidential-candidacy/