Does Everybody Hate Ted Cruz?

You know, I'm definitely beginning to pick up a trend regarding the freshman Senator from Texas--he just rubs people the wrong way. This sensation of almost visceral recoil has been remarked upon pretty much since he's taken office. He's been compared to Sen. Joe McCarthy on the regular (including at the estimable Rumproast if I may point that out), and that's an unfortunate comparison, since McCarthy has become like a byword in senatorial overrreach and lack of decency. (Except it seems as valid a comparison as it is unfortunate.)  He's been considered a conspiracy theorist (Agenda 21, anyone?) and possibly a bit of a sexist prick (mansplaining, anyone?)  And even Our Mister Brooks has pointed out that his fellow senators roll their eyes regarding him and find him "off-putting".  And the NYT's columnist is, whatever his faults as a pundit may be, not exactly the sort of pundit who would slam a freshman Republican Senator for no unwarranted reason.

Really. Except for the things he says and does (like his support for federal assistance for the West, TX disaster after opposition to Superstorm Sandy assistance--consistency?) what could possibly be the unifying factor? It couldn't merely be his possession of a backpfeifengesicht,  like the result of sneering one too many times, when, as anyone's mother might have foretold, it could stick that way.  (I will stick with it being mostly about the things he does and says.)

Which is why it doesn't exactly shock the socks off of me to find that The Washington Post's own Jennifer Rubin has found a bone to pick with him over his description of his fellow Republicans as "squishes" over their curious lack of faith regarding a filibuster over background checks. Except, really? Jennifer Rubin? The Mitt Romney Booster Club's Head Cheerleader? The pundit who once referred to Rand Paul as "formidable" over his Benghazi conspiracy theories (pitched way out of the strike zone of one SOS HRC?).

One pauses, truly, to take it all in. Reagan's Eleventh Commandment is all to pieces, is it not? Or is Cruz just a law unto himself, unaware that ideological purity aside, a representative democracy is something like a popularity contest, and one really does have to serve somebody other than oneself?

I leave it to the reader to decide.

(X-Posted at Rumproast.)