Harvey Milk used to talk a lot about (un)leaders, in other words, those who were leaders, but weren’t. Ted Cruz is a walking, talking, living, breathing example of what it means to be a leader, but not. His stunning idiocy was on display, yet again, just this week.
A couple of days ago, the Texas Republican described the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol as a “violent terrorist attack.” This didn’t seem especially notable — Cruz has used nearly identical phrasing before — and the choice of words is clearly defensible. The senator faced a swift and fierce backlash from the right, which clearly got Cruz’s attention.
And so, the GOP lawmaker scurried to Fox News to apologize, telling Tucker Carlson — one of the far-right voices who was especially aggressive in condemning Cruz’s rhetoric a day earlier — how sorry he was for accidentally telling the truth in a way that hurt conservatives’ feelings.
Ted Cruz has a long, well-established, well-documented thing for self-humiliation. It was not at all surprising that Ted Cruz went on Tucker Carlson’s show—to grovel, to apologize in a mealy-mouthed fashion and get walloped.
Chris Hayes, MSNBC