If This be Madness...

  Ted Cruz will never be President. He is not even making the half-hearted, feeble, and insincere pretense of reaching out to moderate voters, as his competitors are all doing.
  Cruz's strategy is puzzling, even to the most astute of political observers, but I may have the answer.
  It might very well be that Cruz isn't running for President, after all. Oh, he wants a promotion, no doubt about it. But, perhaps Ted Cruz is running for control of the extreme right of the Republican Party. By positioning himself on the fringe and then losing the election, Cruz can face his followers and say: 'Look at what those meanies and poopy-heads did to me. Waaaah!'* He can then wrap the forces of Darkness around him like a Dalmatian puppy-skin coat, and lead his people to hell-in-a-handbasket, or wherever it is they deserve to end up.
  Those who underestimate the Cruzer do so at their peril. I truly believe that, politically speaking, Ted Cruz is an evil genius** who bears watching.

* Imaginative paraphrase
** I will stake my well-deserved reputation on that phrase being, at the very least, half-true.

The Car Slowly Fills

  Rand Paul has become the second Reepub to enter the race to the White House.
  Paul's rollout has not gone particularly well. He has shown some difficulty in answering questions about the many contradictory things he has said over the years. The Senator is using some very clumsy methods of evasion to simply not answer. I thought he'd be better at this. The man is, after all, a thoroughly experienced plagiarist. He should be better at lying.