Last Call For The Cruz Con Game

The Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy has Sen. Ted Cruz down cold:  his idiotic showboating and fake filibuster did nothing to stop Obamacare, but it sure helped him raise a lot of money from Obama-hating Tea Party suckers and lining the pockets of the one percenters using the movement to destroy what little wealth they don't already own.

The biggest actors so far in Defund, Inc. have been Cruz, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and the Senate Conservatives Fund, the leadership PAC that Jim DeMint launched as a senator and handed off to his former staff members to run as a conservative super PAC. While Cruz led the defund fight in the Senate this summer, the SCF led a huge parallel fight on the outside,setting up a website, running radio and television ads, robocalls and a direct mail campaign, all designed to raise money from still-hot conservative activists and urge them to sign a petition to tell Congress not to fund the health-care bill when they greenlight funding for the rest of the government.

Starring in the ads, the robocalls, and the direct-mail campaign were Cruz and Lee, two former Supreme Court clerks turned underdog Senate candidates turned conservative Senate firebrands. As Cruz and Lee staged a filibuster-like marathon speech session Tuesday into Wednesday, the SCF streamed them on its website. But while Lee’s brand of fire is like a light you’d offer a friend looking for a smoke, Cruz’s heat has been pure napalm, much of it focused at his own Republican colleagues in the Senate. It’s made Cruz easily the most hated man in the Senate, but a figure quite beloved by Tea Party purists who want nothing more than to support a senator who is willing to mix it up in a scrum, even—or maybe especially—with his fellow Republicans.

And he doesn't care, because he knows the game:  if America despises Congress, and Congress despises Ted Cruz, he's the ultimate Senate maverick.

Fast forward one year and Cruz has become a superstar for the conservative movement that the Senate Conservatives Fund is looking to harness.  Thanks to Cruz’s star power, they’re doing it.  As Cruz and Lee’s multimedia campaign blanketed the country, the month of August, typically a snooze for D.C.-based fundraisers, yielded the SCF’s largest nonelection year fundraising month to date, at $1.5 million. 

Most importantly, the SCF now has in its possession a massive email list of potential like-minded donors, thanks to the 1.5 million people who signed the defund petition on the Don’tFundObamaCare website.  While "a list" may just be a roster in some circles, in the parlance of power and politics, a list is nothing less than a warchest-in-waiting for the SCF to use on behalf of its allies and against its enemies in the 2014 mid-term elections and the 2016 presidential race.  It also makes the SCF the most relevant, and possibly the most powerful, conservative group in the country, including the Club for Growth and FreedomWorks. 

If anyone is still confused after the Obamacare funding fight (faux filibuster and all), Ted Cruz is now a 2016 contender and the SCF’s biggest ally. Its enemies are many of the men and women he shares a cloakroom with—any Republican senator who did not join in. 

It's the ultimate pogrom to cleanse the GOP of anyone who isn't willing to destroy the 99% in the name of the Masters of the Universe.  These clowns are primarying their own Senators, anyone who might cooperate with Obama for any reason, in order to obliterate them from politics.  The GOP Senate isn't as insane as the GOP House, and they're looking to fix that.

The con is on, and the con men are winning.