"Pay attention to Senator Cruz because he is the unsmiling, contemptuous face of the wild, nasty, hard-right fringe of a Party that once competed with the Democrats to be the country’s governing Party."
So said MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Friday's Hardball (video follows with transcript and commentary):
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let me finish tonight with this. Ted Cruz of Texas is a disaster, not least for the Party that ran him for the Senate. He says he doesn't trust his fellow Republicans. Neither, he said, does he trust Democrats. He's putting himself on the national stage as the enemy of compromise, of reasonable comity between the Parties, of bipartisan agreement itself.
No, Senator Cruz wants all out political war. He wants to bring down the budget, forfeit any Congressional control on spending or taxation. He prefers a chaotic order on Capitol Hill where he can stand in the middle of the legislative traffic yelling stop, where he can derail any reasonable budget control in order to bring attention to himself. He's come to Washington to start fights, to disrupt any chance of ending this dysfunction because dysfunction is what he dearly hopes to someday challenge.
Pay attention to Senator Cruz because he is the unsmiling, contemptuous face of the wild, nasty, hard-right fringe of a Party that once competed with the Democrats to be the country’s governing Party. All Cruz wants to do is prove that self-government is evil or impossible or whatever else will justify his existence as a hard-right political bomb thrower.
As NewsBusters readers are aware, Matthews has been regularly attacking Cruz:
Chris Matthews Links Pro-Second Amendment Ted Cruz to Prosecutor Shootings in Texas
It appears Cruz must be doing something right.
