The votes are in for Right Wing Watch readers’ Equine Posterior Achievement Award, and by a whopping margin this year’s winner is Ted Cruz. With 57.4% of the vote, Cruz easily triumphed over competitors like Michele Bachmann, Pat Robertson and Glenn Beck.
And the achievement is well deserved, considering all of the stunts from Cruz we had to put up with last year.
After triggering the government shutdown over Obamacare, he seems to be the only person in America who actually believes that President Obama and congressional Democrats were responsible for the battle, with Republican leaders admitting that Cruz and his ultraconservative allies were responsible for the disastrous shutdown. During his faux-filibuster of the health care reform law, Cruz held himself in such high regard that he even compared himself to soldiers in World War II who suffered through the Bataan Death March.
Cruz in the end failed to derail Obamacare, and was only able to damage the economy, flub basic Senate rules, grow his fundraising list and become the star of a children’s coloring book. Many of his GOP colleagues in the Senate also took Cruz to task for his role in the disastrous shutdown.
With a penchant for conspiracy theories, Cruz was literally laughed at for his claim about the government creating a “national gun registry” and mocked for invoking fears about the alleged dangers of Agenda 21.
While none of this shouldn’t come as a surprise as he campaigned for the Senate against the imagined threat of Sharia law and a George Soros plot to eliminate golf courses and paved roads, other remarks have been more chilling, like when he wondered if Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took money from North Korea and called the families who lost loved ones in the Newtown massacre “political props.”
Cruz received a hero’s welcome at the Values Voter Summit, one of the biggest conservative gatherings, where attendees loved him so much that one called out to tell him that God is on his side during the shutdown fight.
Well-versed in the Religious Right’s “play-the-victim” rhetoric, Cruz even joked about the White House attempting to kidnap him. Cruz also joined smaller Religious Right events where he urged activists to pray against marriage equality and told the Christian Broadcasting Network that gay rights will lead to the end of free speech.
Right-wing activists love Cruz so much that he has been compared to Ronald Reagan, Vaclav Havel and the Prophet Elijah, and even birthers are lining up behind the Canadian-born Senator.
Congratulations, Sen. Cruz!
Judging by your record, you will probably win the Equine Posterior Achievement Award in 2014 too.
