Ted Cruz, the freshman Senator from Texas, has not made nice with his new friends in the Senate, where decorum and comity are king, and the brash antics of the Tea Party a rude interruption to the ceaseless, genteel banter between the ruling parties.
Canadian-born Cruz, who has voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, raising the debt ceiling, and the Hurricane Sandy relief package, has also been accused of acting like another famous brash Republican Senator: Joseph McCarthy, whom he actually kinda looks like (compare below!).
After Cruz accused defense secretary nominee Chuck Hagel of taking money from North Koreans (with very little proof of such a claim) Senator Barbara Boxer told the New York Times:
"It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,' and, of course, nothing was in the pocket," she said, a reference to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's pursuit of Communists in the 1950s. "It was reminiscent of some bad times."
Senator Claire McCaskill was more direct in the comparison:
"He basically came out and made the accusation about money from North Korea or money from our enemies, and he just laid out there all of this accusatory verbiage without a shred of evidence."
"In this country we had a terrible experience with innuendo and inference when Joe McCarthy hung out in the United States Senate, and I just think we have to be more careful."
Will anyone be able to stop this second McCarthy from spreading lies about war hawks who are possibly just not quite hawkish enough?
Enter Ashley Judd, native Kentuckian, member of the beloved Judd clan, friend of Obama and teammate of Morgan Freeman, who is seriously considering running for Senate against Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Does a Hollywood liberal who doesn't live in Kentucky and opposes mountaintop removal coal-mining stand a chance against the hard-line McConnell? While other Democrats are unsure if she would tarnish the entire ticket, Karl Rove's American Crossroads "super PAC" seems to be taking her candidacy seriously, running a series of online attack ads that paint her as an "Obama-following radical Hollywood liberal".
Will Judd be able to win over a state wary of outsiders? Will Ted Cruz then be mellowed by the southern charm of Judd? Will Morgan Freeman show up as an embittered senatorial aid who wisely tutors Judd on the delicate ways of the senate, while steering her towards revenge on her supposedly dead former husband?