The great American flim-flam man. Oh, boy, have we had our share. But with the Blight Wing Idiocracy having taken advantage of the constantly on media, film flam has completely escaped the Petri dish and rubes everywhere in this great land are signing up to buy their patter.
There's trouble, my friends, yes, we've got trouble.
Right here in River City!
We've got trouble with a T
and that rhymes with P
and that stands for Pool!
There is probably something in a part of some American's psyche that just makes them vulnerable to the flim-flam man, the grifter, the con artist, the snake oil salesman, the people who bamboozle, beguile, bilk, cheat, chisel, dupe, fleece, fool, gull, hose, rook, scam, shaft, and otherwise trick into buying their slop.
Ted Cruz is just another one of those guys, another Professor Henry Hill, another Newt Gingrich, Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bernie Madoff, Rick Warren, Ken Lay, Jim Bakker, Benny Hinn, Huey Long, Donald Trump, Elmer Gantry, or the Peddler Man from Oklahoma!. Somehow, it is always the blight wing that produces the parasite con artists.
Create an enemy, get some attention, provide a glitzy, clubby association in opposition to the enemy, raise the noise level, get the rubes to sign up, then take their money and their loyalty and do with what you please. Then accuse your opposition of the very qualities you are employing -- your opposition are shysters, playing on gullible rubes -- hide behind the pointed finger that the rubes are all to willing to follow.
The film-flam man probably isn't uniquely American, but in America he reaches the top of his craft. It is enough of an American archetype to figure into the canon of American arts. Americans are desperate to believe certain things about themselves and will do almost anything to prove their beliefs. Americans may or may not be exceptional, but one of our exceptional qualities is the ability of our rubes to form an enthusiastic herd. The sense of belonging may be just too much to resist in eras of relative alienation -- now there's some do-it-yourself mass psychology.
But at his root, Cruz is just that. Selling brass band instruments to defeat the evils of pool halls, taking donations from poor people who can't afford it (but who feel they are doing the Founders' work and the Lord's work), self-promotiing, getting out ahead of the mob, getting into the spotlight, these are Cruz's greatest talents.
Cruz is the second coming of Newt Gingrich, who used C-SPAN to promote himself talking trash about liberals to an empty, off-camera House chamber. The only difference today is the utter gall, and the proliferation of media giving Cruz the pulpit and spreading his message for him. Cruz is after the same thing, control of the Gopers, using Tea-fueled rage to do it. He is Goldwater, without even Goldwater's self-limits. In the film-flam world, you get what you dare and what you can before you get caught or go on the lam. They usually get caught, but, oh, the damage they cause beforehand.
So, the Gopers are stuck with another blight-wing con man. Who'd a thunk it? The party of the idiocracy spawns a new shiny object for the schooling minnow-minds.
Hopefully, we will dodge another self-promoting sociopathic megalomaniac's damage to the nation. An odd sight is the number of Gopers coming out as non-rubes, demonstrating that there may be limits, even for the blight-wing -- who'd a thunk that?
Maybe it's true -- maybe Cruz is a liberal Manchurian Candidate, destroying the blight wing from the inside out.
What a bum.