Cruz Carnival, Heading Aground

After nine months in office, Texas’ junior Senator has seized the GOP stage, a perhaps unspectacular feat in light of the party’s leadership vacuum.

What his colleagues have to decide now is whether Ted Cruz is anything more than a loudmouth Pied Piper leading them off the edge of rationality to political irrelevance, a Sarah Palin in pants spouting absurdities, a potentially imminent beneficiary of Congress’ excellent health coverage, physical and mental, like Michele Bachmann.

Is his vowing to speak against Obamacare “until I’m no longer able to stand” a parliamentary move or the work of a premier performance artist?

In these disturbing days, as we all try to navigate our private worlds as best we can, it’s unnerving to be awash in shameless madness to the point of doubting our own sanity in a real world. Why has Ted Cruz been visited on us?

Did we miss Glenn Beck so much that we needed a clone on the Senate floor to compare his doubters to appeasers of Nazi Germany in the 1940s?

At the moment that Cruz is seizing the attention of 24/7 media with all this, Barack Obama is at the United Nations, demonstrating once again America’s good fortune in having a President who, for all his shortcomings, is still learning from experience and trying to keep the nation sane.

GOP “leaders” like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are hiding in the deep Capitol weeds, hoping against hope the Cruz storm will blow over without wrecking their chances to hold on to their pitifully powerless jobs.

Voters can only feel as if they have booked one of those touted luxury liners with a mad captain running it aground while the Wall Street Journal is on the Tea Party intercom reassuring passengers everything is under “Cruz control.”

Maybe so, but not everybody has a first-class cabin like Rupert Murdoch.