Being Ted Cruz Means You Never Have to Apologize for Lying.

The Washington Post quotes Ted Cruz from tonight's GOP primary debate:

“First of all we have seen how in 6 years of Obamacare that it’s been a disaster. It is the biggest job killer in this country. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, have been forced into part time work, have lost their health insurance, have lost their doctors, have seen their premiums sky rocket.”

What do we make of Cruz's claim that millions of Americans have lost their jobs? This is what the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics tells us about job growth in the Obama era:

The truth, of course, is that under President Obama the nation has seen 69 straight months of private sector job growth, with over 1/4 million new jobs in November alone and a net increase of well over 13 1/2 million new jobs over that span.

What do we make of Cruz's claim that millions of Americans have lost their health insurance due to the Affordable Care Act? The truth is the current rate of 9.2% uninsured is the lowest it has ever been in this country:

Cruz's rather tenuous grasp of the facts when it comes to health care reform should perhaps not surprise us. After all, this is a man so clueless on health insurance issues he mistakenly claimed to have lost insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, only to have to walk the claim back when it was revealed that, despite his claims to the contrary, Cruz in fact had it all along.

In a reversal from claims made on the campaign trail, Ted Cruz's presidential campaign is now saying the senator and his family do have health insurance and never lost coverage. The late night Friday revelation came more than 24 hours after Cruz had told a New Hampshire audience that he and his family were without health insurance and were scrambling to obtain new coverage--and used the claim to slam Obamacare for the mess he was in. 

In statements to Bloomberg and Wall Street Journal, campaign spokeswoman Catherine Frazier blamed Cruz's false assertion that his family had lost their health insurance on a misunderstanding... 

I guess "misunderstanding" is one way of putting it, another might be to say that he was "caught in another lie."

The Problem With Being A Racist, Nativist Party...

I guess it was only a matter of time beforeTed Cruz, presidential candidate and most hated man in the U.S. senate, would fall victim to his own party's anti-immigrant fervor. Climbing in the polls and threatening the Trump campaign in Iowa, Cruz has become the target of accusations and insinuations that the conservative firebrand, born of a Cuban father and American mother on Canadian soil (Calgary), does not meet the Constitutional requirement that a president be a "natural born citizen."

From the left, it's deliciously ironic to see this sort of comeuppance for man who sought to reassure GOP voters of his anti-immigrant bonafides by paraphrasing George Wallace's "segregation forever speech" for The New York Times. And of course, there's more than just a little satisfaction to be gained by watching the party that spawned an industry of nutty conspiracy theorists dedicated to casting doubt on Barack Obama's eligibility now setting its sights on destroying one of its own.

While questions about Cruz's eligibility have popped up now and again for years, this latest round of doubt sowing started with Donald Trump, who in his typically disingenuos, trademarked passive-aggressive way insisted that he was only looking out for the good of the Republican Party:

"Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem. It’d be a very precarious one for Republicans because he’d be running and the courts may take a long time to make a decision. You don’t want to be running and have that kind of thing over your head. I’d hate to see something like that get in his way. But a lot of people are talking about it and I know that even some states are looking at it very strongly, the fact that he was born in Canada and he has had a double passport.”

Not long after Trump lobbed his non-accusation accusation right-wing harpy Ann Coulter chimed in in more direct fashion, explicitly proclaiming through her twitter account that Cruz was not at natural born citizen.

NYT: Cruz was born outside the U.S. to 1 American parent: "Under the Constitution this makes him a 'natural born citizen.'” Absolutely false

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 6, 2016

And now the floodgates seem to be opening with Rand Paul and John McCain questioning the Texas senator's eligibility to hold the highest office in the land. The McCain attack is particularly amusing, given that the Arizona senator was himself born abroad and ran for president nonetheless. The distinction, as McCain sees it, is that he was born in a U.S. Territory (a military base in the Panama Canal zone):

“Barry Goldwater ran for president; was born in Arizona when it was a territory. The Panama Canal was a territory of the United States of America. That’s different than being born on foreign soil. I think there is a question. I am not a constitutional scholar on that, but I think it’s worth looking into. I don’t think its illegitimate to look into it.”

In 2008, when John McCain decided to seek the presidency, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama co-sponsored a Senate resolution affirming the Arizona senator's eligibility to run for president. Today, Texas senator Ted Cruz is seeing questions about his eligibility being raised within his own party. I guess that's what happens when you set out to promote your personal career by trashing everyone around you, then cynically shut down the government to establish your own "holier than thou" ideological purity, while forcing others in your party to do the thankless work of keeping the country from a disastrous default.

I think I'll just sit back an enjoy the show.