WASHINGTON, D.C.—Tailgunner Ted Cruz, who is running a presidential campaign based on his fanciful concept of "religious liberty," called a press conference Tuesday morning to discuss the attacks in Belgium. He also issued a statement. He had some modest proposals that he wanted to float.

"We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized."

"Secure" is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence, and little of that work is good, and none of it has fck-all to do with "religious liberty." It has more to do with vigilantism, official and otherwise.

Even before the Brussels attacks took over the news cycle, it has been lost in the campaign coverage that the Tailgunner really has let his authoritarian freak flag fly. Regularly, on the stump, he promises to unleash the full weight of the Department of Justice on Planned Parenthood. He also said he would pardon the two ratfckers who phonied up the famous videos.

Listen, as a Texan, as a Houstonian, I was deeply dismayed and disappointed to see the Harris County district attorney bringing criminal charges against someone who went undercover to expose what appears to be vast criminal conduct by Planned Parenthood. I think he performed an incredible public service and I'll tell you this. I've pledged if I'm elected president, on the very first day in office, I intend to instruct the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into Planned Parenthood and to prosecute any and all criminal conduct by that organization.

Surely you notice the mischief hidden in the phrase, "any and all criminal conduct." Cruz is saying plainly that he will put the feds on Planned Parenthood with the express mission of finding some reason to bring criminal charges, which a whole raft of state investigations has told us simply do not exist.

On Monday night, during a bloodthirsty speech to a rapt audience at the AIPAC policy conference—Likud cheer-team leader Jen Rubin was over the moon about it; QED—Cruz demonstrated that the Cruz administration is going to be awfully busy chasing down political criminals as defined by President Ted Cruz.

"And, as president, I will do everything in my power to ensure that anyone who provides financial support to the BDS movement, including schools and universities, will lose any access to federal funding. And to the extent that they have engaged in illegal behavior, they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

(An aside: you will note that the Tailgunner just loves to say the name, "Ayatollah Kham-ay-nee." It seems to get him rather excited downstairs. "Hear my words, Ayatollah Kham-ay-nee, if I am president, and Iran launches a missile test, we will…shoot…that…missile…down." Right. Who's "we," by the way?)

The comparisons that have been made between Cruz and the original Tailgunner, Joe McCarthy, are not idle ones. Cruz once gave a speech accusing Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty in the 1990s.

"There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government."

No proof of this ever was offered, of course.

The parallel sharpened even more when Chuck Hagel, nominated to be Secretary of Defense, faced hearings on his confirmation before a Senate committee blessed with Cruz's presence. Cruz intimated that Hagel was unqualified because an Iranian official had praised his nomination, as though Hagel had any control over that. He also intimated that Hagel may have received $200,000 from North Korea. No proof of this ever was offered, of course. By the end of the hearings, John McCain was beside himself, and Barbara Boxer was openly making the McCarthy comparison.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

"We can go all the way back, of course, to the time of the Cold War and back to the 1920s, '30s, '40s when communists, you know, the KGB, infiltrated our government at the very highest levels. And then, like now, we were unprepared and in large measure unaware of what was going on, at least until the House Un-American Activities got rolling in the 1950s with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who absolutely was spot-on in just about everything he said about the levels of infiltration," she said. "So we have precedent for this where we were not fully aware of the infiltration occurring at the time."

There is a difference though. Joe McCarthy never got close to being president. He was unstable and drank himself to death. There are about three people right now with a chance to be president. One of them is Ted Cruz. Be aware.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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