Republican Sen. Ted Cruz received an eight-minute standing ovation upon his return to Texas this past weekend, despite an extended, hostile campaign from Democrats and the mainstream media to portray him as a dangerous extremist.

“After two months in Washington, it’s great to be back in America,” Cruz said Saturday to approximately 750 people at an appearance in a San Antonio hotel ballroom, enjoying an eight-minute standing ovation for his dogged efforts to defund or delay Obamacare in the recent continuing-resolution budget fight.

Cruz also criticized members of his own Senate caucus for “failing to stand with House Republicans against the train wreck that is Obamacare.”

The establishment media consistently criticized Cruz for supposedly violating Senate procedure and inflaming tensions with his more than 21-hour floor speech in favor of defunding Obamacare, despite the fact that most journalists have never done anything for 21 consecutive hours in their entire lives, according to reluctant Daily Caller interactions with respectable and educated Washington reporters.

Though the American press has devolved from its Joseph Pulitzer-dominated populist model to its dispiriting current incarnation, in which journalists feel it is their obligation to stand up for parliamentary procedure against rabble-rousing political stars trying to do interesting things for a change, the people of red-state America remain unswayed by anti-Cruz attacks.

Cruz registered a 74 percent favorability rating against an 8 percent unfavorability rating among Tea Party Republicans, and a 56 percent favorability rating among non-Tea Party Republicans, according to a Pew Research Center poll released last week. These numbers inspired The Daily Beast to declare that “The Ted Cruz Armageddon is Coming.”

While Armageddon is slated to last until all those who oppose Jehovah are cleansed from the Earth, it is unclear if God and the Four Horsemen will be able to make it past 21 hours.

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