When Ted Cruz announced this week that he was firing his campaign’s communications director for circulating a false insinuation that Marco Rubio had belittled the Bible, he told reporters, “Even if it was true, we are not a campaign that is going to question the faith of another candidate.”
Huh. Then I must have been hallucinating last month at a Cruz event in Iowa where several of his hand-picked supporters, who spoke just before him, mocked and dismissed Donald Trump’s professed Christianity.
They marveled at a past comment of Trump’s about never asking God for forgiveness. One of them chose a bizarre, religiously coded analogy for a boast Trump had just made about how much voters loved him, saying that the billionaire’s bragging was an echo of John Lennon’s infamous claim – an outrage to American Christians in the 1960s – that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus.
The Texas senator is some piece of double-talking, disingenuous work. While the so-called dirty tricks that he and his lieutenants have been charged with aren’t all that shocking by the standards of bruising presidential campaigns, they really do stand out in the context of Cruz’s flamboyant claims of rectitude and righteousness.
He directs you to his halo as he surreptitiously grabs a pitchfork.