Drill, Canadian Baby, Drill!
Texan/late-in-life country music fan Ted Cruz was born as Rafael Cruz in the American suburb of Calgary, Canada, where his Cuban father and American mother were working in the oil industry. Drill, baby, drill!
Like certain other people in the race, Cruz’s father is Cuban, but thankfully he has a much more compelling tale of escape than Marco Rubio’s snooze-fest of a family origin story, which is underwhelming even before you learn it isn’t true. Because that’s all we have to compare it to, let’s not let the fact that much of Cruz’s story appears to be fabricated as well distract us from the exciting tale of elder Rafael Cruz fighting US-installed dictator Fulgencio Batista side-by-side with Fidel Castro’s forces in the early days of the Cuban Revolution, theoretically sharing a geographic location with Frank Pais, Cuban hero. None of this can be verified by eyewitnesses or the many Cubans who professionally track Cuban Revolutionary history, but a few people do remember him going to some protests and participating in a strike or two so...there. Naturally the fact that he was basically fighting a problem created by the US did not dampen the elder Rafael’s enthusiasm for the great promised land of America, where, after being tortured by the police due to his (alleged) involvement in the Revolution, he escaped with a visa and $10 sewn into his underwear to attend the University of Texas in Austin. Safely ensconced in the great promised land of The Capitalist States of America, Rafael decided that he didn’t condone Castro’s turn to Communism and never went back. (Less popular is the story of his counter-revolutionary aunt, who seems to have had a greater impact on Cruz’s political ideology since she fought against Castro’s forces to maintain the pro-Capitalism, anti-Cuba regime that was already in place.)
Cruz’s mother Eleanor, meanwhile, was a working-class Delaware native who went to Rice and, according to a story Ted Cruz loves tells tea party groups despite it’s oddly feminist undertones, refused to learn to type so that when men asked her to type stuff out she could say: “I would love to help you out, but I don’t know how to type. I guess you’re going to have to use me as a computer programmer instead.”
Flash-forward to Canada, where as “expats” from the oilfields of Texas, the younger Rafael’s parents did their damndest to instil in their son an ultra-American sense of outright greed and a hunger for power. They experienced early success - like many young Canadian citizens, Cruz remembers that “It was cold” in those early years, something no thinking person could deny about Canada, but unlike most other Canadian citizens, he didn’t develop a skill for being polite and respectful. Win! Eventually the family moved back to Houston, where the mini-Cruz became a fully-formed asshat, joining a high school group sponsored by the Free Enterprise Institute in which participants memorized the Constitution, then took every wrong lessons from it and gave speeches on those lessons plus their general thoughts on the glories of conservatism to unsuspecting Texans state-wide.
Self-Important Terror
After boring people by giving condescending Free Enterprise speeches across Texas, Ted Cruz was eventually accepted at Princeton, where he became a champion debater, possibly because he lacks sensible core principles/empathy and can therefore take on any side of any issue with a vengeance. Those debate chops led him to Harvard Law, where he became the founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review and continued his reign of debating terror. According to roommates at the time, he also began a reign of self-important terror in that he started refusing to study with anybody from the “minor Ivies” like Penn and Brown because, as we know, he’s such a goddamn intellect.
Cruz’s debating days were when people first realized that his sense of humor is a little off-kilter. According to the Harvard Debate Team reunion booklet of 2001, he suggested in one debate that a method for detecting infidelity would be for God to “give women a hymen that grows back every time she has intercourse with a different guy, because that will be a ‘visible sign’ of the breach of trust.” He was also remembered for other misogynistic gems such his angry 1989 retort to the idea that Ricky Ricardo should have let his wife Lucy which involved him shouting, “Well, guess what, I’m Cuban! And no self-respecting Cuban man of the era would let his wife work.”
Despite his ferocity and ease with sexist humor, Cruz could apparently be easily flustered by jokes about his frequent and untiring references to his father’s inspirational life story, which he interjected at every opportunity and often at non-opportunities as well. Once a joke was made he would immediately get angry and lash out in a hilarious display of nonsense-brain. Plus, there was this one time he thought a good joke would be to impersonate Nixon. A real laugh riot, that guy.
Predictable Evil
After school, Cruz clerked for a judge in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, then in 1996 became a clerk for SCOTUS Chief Justice Rehnquist, which is predictably evil of him. From there he became a domestic policy adviser to Dubya during the 2000 Presidential campaign, where he met his wife Heidi. She really doubled down on the evil life and went on to work for Goldman Sachs after the campaign was over, but Cruz used his Florida recount pedigree to get a job as an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department and a director of policy planning for the FTC.
In 2001, Cruz, like all Americans, witnessed the horrors of 9/11 and experienced a major internal shift...from being a fan of rock ‘n roll and musical scores like family-values favorite Les Miserables to identifying with the sad, soulful, blind patriotism of Texas-proud country music. This is a totally sincere thing he did so we know for sure that he’s a patriot #caseclosed.
In 2003 Cruz returned to Texas to take a job as solicitor general, during which he wrote 70 Supreme Court briefs and argued before his venerable former employer nine times. While there he defended a slew of terrible things such as the Texas Capitol’s Ten Commandments monument, requiring the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools, and Texas’ right to kill foreign nationals in Medellin v. Texas, the case he is most proud of/America should be most embarrassed by. (This decision essentially gave states the right to ignore a UN treaty that even North Korea honors, so that’s awkward.)
After doing his damndest to ruin America via the law, Cruz went to work in the private sector and got paid mucho dinero to represent the interests of giant corporate interests/trample the little guy. Yay capitalism!
Routine Underperformance
In 2012, Ted Cruz took on a new challenge. Despite having never held public office, he thought “hey, somebody’s gotta be the senator from Texas” and threw his hat into the ring. According to one source, the “run for office” plan was all just an elaborate attempt to get the job of attorney general, though since 2012 it’s grown into a veritable loonpot movement anchored by ideas such as that one senator can and should single-handedly shut down the government, costing millions of people their livelihood, over a single piece of legislation he doesn’t like.
Ted Cruz has had many “fine” moments in Congress, but the most famous by far is the 23 hour non-filibuster of Obamacare he carried out during which he held up senate business by reading, among other things, Green Eggs and Ham. At BTL we can always get behind a filibuster, fake or not, because Dr. Seuss so rarely gets a day in Congress, but what we can’t get behind is a man who thinks it’s his prerogative to rob other people of needed care while himself benefitting from a gold-plated insurance plan paid for by a rich company that Americans bailed out only a few years ago. (Thanks wifey!)
Most of what Cruz has done since joining the Senate in 2013 is piss off his own colleagues and make a mockery of the business of governing. Here are some of his wrong ideas in list form:
- He hates avocados despite being from a major guacamole state. According to The Dallas Observer, "this is what happens when we elect a Canadian."
- He hates Obamacare more than any single American/Canadian despite the fact that Texas has the highest uninsured population in America. Obamacare gave 1.2 million people there coverage which is just the worst, isn’t it? (No, it’s the best. Also, shut up Ted Cruz. You're a hypocrite.)
- He thinks the UN is trying to eliminate golf.
- He was one of only eight senators to vote against the Violence Against Women Act. Prick.
- He’s planning another shutdown, this time over Planned Parenthood.
- He’s against immigration reform, and that’s possibly why he routinely underperforms amount Texas Latino voters, even by GOP standards.
There’s a lot more where that came from. That’s probably why the Houston Chronicle endorsed him, then wrote an editorial regretting their decision.
Political Quagmire
Questions have been flying, both on the internet and in our jokes about whether Cruz meets the definition of a “natural born citizen,” one of the two requirements for running for president. Consensus seems to be that he *probably* can, but with birther king Donald Trump in the race, his Canadian provenance might turn into a political quagmire anyway.
Additionally, since entering the political arena, Cruz has also been asked time and time again to prove that he’s a real American and not a Canadian shill. As a result, Cruz has unsuccessfully attempted to “renounce” his Canadian citizenship - probably the most valuable citizenship in the northern hemisphere by virtue of the free healthcare it entitles you to - repeatedly. He’s done this by announcing his intention to renounce it in the media multiple times and, as far as anybody knows, taking no further action. Becoming un-Canadian actually involves five steps and costs $100, but it’s probably better for him to hang on to it anyway - he’ll need somewhere for health care to go when he single-handedly gets rid of the ACA.