WASHINGTON -- An anti-Ted Cruz group is poking fun at the senator's "Tough as Texas" slogan by pointing out how he cozied up to Donald Trump despite the abuse the president heaped on him during the 2016 campaign.

The ad, released Monday by Fire Ted Cruz PAC and cut by Austin director Richard Linklater, uses the actor who explains Texas' cultural geography in Linklater's film Bernie.

"I mean, come on," says Sonny Carl Davis, in character as the same small-town Texan he plays in Bernie. "If somebody called my wife a dog, and said my daddy was in on the Kennedy assassination, I wouldn't be kissing their ass. You stick a finger in their chest and give 'em a few choice words. Or you drag their ass out by the woodshed and kick their ass, Ted. Come on. Ted."

Bernie, a 2011 dark comedy set in Carthage, starred Jack Black as a funeral director. Davis has a show-stealing scene explaining Texas to the uninitiated.

"Sonny's character really captures what most Texans understand about Cruz: He's a spineless liar who puts his own ambition ahead of doing his job for the people of Texas," said Marc Stanley, a Dallas lawyer and Democratic donor who formed the PAC, which operates independently of Democratic Rep. Beto O'Rourke's campaign.

The PAC has raised about $500,000 so far and will air this ad through social media, Stanley said.

The group felt obliged to punch back at Cruz, whose campaign and outside allies have been pounding O'Rourke with attack ads, in part because O'Rourke has vowed to remain upbeat, Stanley said.

"It's not in Beto's DNA to be negative. That's one of the reasons that we started Fire Ted Cruz PAC, so that we could tell people how awful Ted Cruz is," he said.

The group previously aired an anti-Cruz testimonial from Cecile Richards, daughter of the late Gov. Ann Richards and longtime head of Planned Parenthood, urging voters to oust Cruz to protect abortion rights.

Davis' character in Bernie explains Texas' varied regions this way: "Up north you got your Dallas snobs, with their Mercedes. Then you got the Houston -- the Carcinogenic Coast is what I call it. ... Then down south, San Antonio -- that's where the Tex meets the Mex. Like the food. And then in Central Texas, you got the People's Republic of Austin, with a bunch of hairy-legged women and liberal fruitcakes."

Cruz ran second to Trump in the GOP primaries and outlasted a long list of candidates who couldn't survive Trump's put-downs. The president who labeled him "Lyin' Ted" has promised to campaign for him this month at a massive rally in Texas as Cruz fights to fend off O'Rourke.

As the new ad says, Trump insulted Heidi Cruz's looks during the primaries and cited an uncorroborated and highly speculative report in the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer to assert that Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, had worked with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

At the height of the rancor, Cruz called Trump a "pathological liar" and other epithets.

In their only debate so far, at Southern Methodist University on Sept. 21, Cruz said he hadn't given up his dignity to set aside the rancor with Trump. Rather, he said, he'd made a responsible choice on behalf of his constituents.

"There were some hard shots thrown," he said, adding that his dad has been his hero his whole life and "Heidi is my best friend."

But "after the election in 2016, I faced a choice. ... Donald Trump had been elected president and we had an opportunity ... to do something extraordinary. ... I could have chosen to make it about myself ... to say my feelings are hurt and take my marbles and go home," he said.

O'Rourke insisted that Cruz has failed to confront Trump when it counted, instead serving as an enabler.

"When the president attacks our institutions, this country, allows a foreign power to invade our democracy, that is our business. We need a U.S. senator who will stand up to this president," he said.