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Andrea, this is the strategy of Ted Cruz and going back to mid-September, I said that Ted Cruz was a fraud, that there was a dead-end to this policy and it made no sense to follow it. John Boehner also told us in early September that it would be the wrong thing to do to shut down the government in an attempt to defund Obamacare. Unfortunately, we have three or four dozen Republicans in the House, Cruz Republicans, who basically threatened to bring the House down if John Boehner did not pursue this policy. John knew it was not doing to work, but he felt he had no choice. I understand his position.

I'm really more concerned about why more Republicans around the country didn't join me in denouncing Ted Cruz. We now have people on the sidelines coming forward who we have to take a stand here. We cannot allow our party to be taken over by the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. I mean, these are people, isolationists, I consider them RINOs, because they don't represent traditional Republican principles. Ted Cruz, what he did here, was lead the party into a dead end with no strategy, somehow convincing a number of House Republicans that we just sent this to through Senate as far as defunding and closing down the government, he would manage to get Harry Reid and President Obama to back down. He never had a plan. It was fraudulent from the start. And we have to cut this guy off now. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/10/11/rep_peter_king_ted_c
ruz_and_rand_paul_are_rinos.html]

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Ted Cruz: The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas

In less than a year, Texas Republican Ted Cruz has become the most despised man in the U.S. Senate. He's been likened to Joe McCarthy, accused of behaving like a schoolyard bully, and smeared by senior members of his own party.

It's hard for Ted Cruz to be humble. Part of the challenge stems from his résumé, which the Texas senator wears like a sandwich board. There's the Princeton class ring that's always on his right hand and the crimson gown that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, he donned when called upon to give a commencement speech earlier this year. (Cruz's fellow Harvard Law alums Barack Obama and Mitt Romney typically perform their graduation duties in whatever robes they're given.) Even Cruz's favorite footwear, a pair of black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, serves as an advertisement for his credentials and connections. "These are my argument boots," he told me one morning this summer as we rode the subway car beneath the Capitol to a vote on the Senate floor. "When I was Texas solicitor general, I did every argument in these boots.

Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation's capital. That alone isn't so outrageous for the Senate. "Every one of these guys thinks he's the smartest guy in the room," one senior Democratic aide told me. "But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He's just so brazen."

Little more than a month after Cruz was sworn in, Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California, likened him to Joe McCarthy for his conduct during Chuck Hagel's confirmation for secretary of defense. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Cruz insinuated that Hagel, a fellow Republican, was on the take from America's enemies. Because Hagel had declined to reveal the source of a $200,000 payment, Cruz suggested, how do we know it didn't come from the North Korean government? Or Saudi Arabia's? Even South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, called Cruz's line of inquiry "out of bounds."

For a while, veteran Republicans groused in private about the new guy. But it boiled over when Cruz joined Kentucky senator Rand Paul's filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA—an act of protest against Obama's drone program. John McCain, already seething over Cruz's treatment of Hagel, called them "wacko birds." "He fucking hates Cruz," one adviser of the Arizona senator told me. "He's just offended by his style."

I visited him on Capitol Hill...He was giving me a tour of his Senate office. But all along, what kept drawing my eye was a giant oil painting above the couch depicting Cruz as he delivered the first of his nine oral arguments before the Supreme Court. It is an unusual painting: From the artist's vantage point, we see three other courtroom artists, each also drawing Cruz—so the painting actually features not one but four images of young Cruz before the bench. "It is helpful," he explained to me, "for keeping one grounded." http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201310/ted-cruz-republican-
senator-october-2013#ixzz2hSBsQTWb]

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