Outstanding. Simply outstanding. The only real shot Ted Cruz has at becoming the Republican presidential nominee over Donald Trump is for his fellow Republicans, most of whom hate his everloving guts, to mount an all-out offensive at the Republican convention in order to unseat the front-runner Trump and choose Cruz as their nominee regardless of who has the most delegates. Toward this end, Ted Cruz has been trying to convince his fellow party members that he is a nice guy after all—but he just can't help being an asshole.
Frank Gaffney, a prominent anti-Muslim activist and former Reagan administration official, will join the Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) campaign's national security advisory team, according to Bloomberg's Eli Lake.
Other members of Gaffney's Center for Security Policy -- Fred Fleitz, Clare Lopez, and Jim Hanson -- will also join Cruz's national security advisory team, according to Bloomberg.
Who is Frank Gaffney, you may ask? He's a virulently anti-Muslim arch-conspiracy-theorist and one of the primary founders and proponents of the conservative notion that secret Muslims have been infiltrating our government—as in, all of it, by his telling, every little nook and cranny—in order to sharia us all. Previously a leading voice in conservative bomb-them-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out circles, Gaffney finally gained himself a good and proper shunning after he started claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood was also infiltrating CPAC, the deeply conservative yearly conference, publicly accusing specific individual too-ethnic or linked-to-an-ethnic-person members of the CPAC board of being Muslim Brotherhood plants.
And the top Muslim Brotherhood plant, according to him, is conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist, who is the closest thing wealthy government-hating conservatives have to their own personal Jesus.
You don't attack Grover Norquist and live, in conservative politics, and so Gaffney was finally kneecapped in 2011, getting himself barred from CPAC and finally shunned by any conservative who thought that maybe-just-maybe secret Muslims were not controlling people through the fillings in their teeth after all, or that even if they were Gaffney shouldn't be going around muttering that top Republican heroes were in on it too.
He's crept back into those same circles since, finally getting un-barred from CPAC this year, and it should be said that the Batshit Insane wing of the party (see: various Republican House members, mostly the very dumb ones) never distanced themselves all that far, being that devoted to and reliant upon his rabid anti-Muslim fearmongering. But among the people whose support Ted Cruz really ought to be trying to win if he's going to present himself as a "unity" candidate worth a knock-down, drag-out convention fight, the party elders and bigwigs? They're probably not going to be impressed that Ted Cruz, the guy who can't get along with anyone, is boosting Mister Grover Norquist Is A Secret Muslim.
On the other hand, maybe it won't matter a bit. We're presuming here that there's anyone at all left in the party with ethical standards, someone who would take Grover Norquist's side if some screeching lunatic pointed his finger and declared him of secret Muslim witchcraft. We're presuming Grover Norquist himself even takes offense anymore, though he was infuriated back then; maybe these days he's fine with being lumped into the Obama-Clinton-EverybodyElse Muslim conspiracy theories, just as long as the person who's doing the pointing cuts his goddamn taxes. We don't know. We shouldn't presume.
Still, though, there's really no question that Sen. Ted Cruz is an asshole. An asshole who surrounds himself with the nation's worst and most unhinged conspiracy theorists, no less.