Thursday, October 01, 2015

Mr. Smarmy, called another thing at another time and place.

See red meat to the wolves.

A link.

Demagogue? Is that a better term than the Speaker's? Smarmy remains my Ted Cruz vote. Snake is another possible Cruz descriptive word. I stick with smarmy.

Regarding the Speaker, an interesting monologue, and note a couple of references to 1980 and onward.

As to differing terminology, Breitbart.com appears to indirectly deny the Speaker knows one when he sees one.


UPDATE: After the recent vote to fund the government through Dec. 11, to avoid a GOP shutdown and the unpopular results for that party another GOP shutdown would have brought, other terms for Mr. Smarmy, one man's opinion at Salon [with editorial approval there], "grifter," and the trifecta headlining, "self-promoting narcissist" "a fraud and a nihilist;" online respectively, here and here, embedded video and all. But Salon leans left, correct? Well, Politico leans right, but is NOT batshit crazy nor super-mean, so check out its posts here and here. Cruz is wearing thin on his own party, being too much of an ass among Republicans; and that is a tall order given the context. If they were to have discovered a foreign object in their punch bowl, many in that group might think it was Cruz that put it there. Politico, here in a Sept. 28, 2015, item (as already cited), writes:

On Monday night, Cruz’s colleagues ignored his attempt to disrupt Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s efforts to fund the government without attacking Planned Parenthood. In an unusual rebuke, even fellow Republicans denied him a “sufficient second” that would have allowed him a roll call vote.

Then, his Republican colleagues loudly bellowed “no” when Cruz sought a voice vote, a second repudiation that showed how little support Cruz has: Just one other GOP senator — Utah’s Mike Lee — joined with Cruz as he was overruled by McConnell and his deputies.

It was the second time that Cruz had been denied a procedural courtesy that’s routinely granted to senators in both parties. The first came after he called McConnell a liar this summer.

Cruz was incredulous on Monday, calling it an “unprecedented procedural trick."

“What does denying a second mean? Denying a recorded vote. Why is that important?” Cruz said. “When you are breaking the commitment you’ve made to the men and women who elected you, the most painful thing in the world is accountability.”

Indeed, denying Cruz a vote prevents the Texas senator from dredging up the roll call in the future and using it to attack his colleagues.

[...] Cruz’s speech was filled with familiar accusations that Republican leaders were capitulating, even as he praised Democrats for being more resolute than the GOP. But Cruz also personally lambasted McConnell and his deputies for denying a roll call vote that would have failed anyway, arguing that results are rigged in the Senate and that conservatives have no influence anymore.

“There are no mystical powers that allow you to roll over that. But in the House we still got 30, 40, 50 strong conservatives,” Cruz said.

In reality, it’s not Senate procedure that stymied Cruz on Monday night. Republicans have grown tired of Cruz pushing proposals that he knows McConnell and other Republicans will never back, like defunding Planned Parenthood in a spending bill, then criticizing McConnell for not taking up the plan even as he uses the fight to bolster his presidential campaign as Washington's consummate outsider.

When Senate GOP members as a bloc discredit and distrust the motives of one of their own, publicly, you are dealing with week old fish, noted as pungent.