Crazy people love Ted Cruz
It looks like Republican senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul have been taking a break from their busy schedule of denying food to poor people in order to sell themselves to the fine Christian conservatives gathered for this year's
Value Voters Summit:
“This is not a fundraiser, nor an endorsement of U.S. Senator Rand Paul or U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, just a great opportunity for you to get to know them and discuss your ideas and views with them and hear of their lives, faith, and respective vision for our nation,” wrote Robert Fischer, a South Dakota-based conservative organizer, in an emailed invitation to dozens of evangelical Christian leaders.
The gathering is being held in conjunction with the Family Research Council’s Values Voters conference, an annual gathering of Christian conservatives in Washington, but it is not an official part of that event. Rather, it is being staged by a loosely-organized group of Republican leaders that call themselves “Conservatives of Faith.”
In other words, it was a private meeting in which the big names of the pseudo-religious movement get to suss out whether Cruz and Paul have the right stuff to be endorsed to a Tony Perkins-led collection of rubes and morons.
For those of you who don't know what the Values Voters thing is: hmm. It's put on by the Family Research Council (aka Tony Perkins), and is much like CPAC or any other conservative conference but with the word "Jesus" thrown in more often to make things sound more godly and whatnot. It's also a haven for some of the worst bigots and conspiracy theorists the conservative movement has to offer, which is precisely why Republicans with national ambitions feel obligated to cater to them each year. Cruz and Paul both seem to be prepping for presidential runs—who knows, maybe they will have deigned to allow the government to continue to exist by then—and need to stay tight with the anti-homosexual, Obama-as-secret-Muslim crowds.
I really wanted to make fun of this and them, but you know what? The whole thing has gotten so scabby as to not really lend itself to parody anymore. The supposed Values Voters crowd is most notable for professional conspiracy theorists like Joe Farah and Jerome Corsi, professional Muslim-hating conspiracy theorists like Frank Gaffney (of "Grover Norquist is a secret Muslim" fame), and more birthers than you could count. That the same crowd can command the attendance of Cruz, Paul, Michele Bachmann, Paul Ryan and similar Republicans is representative of how reliant on extremist crackpots the party has become.