To work with Ted Cruz is to hate him

To work with Ted Cruz is to hate him

“I was fascinated to hear that because I haven’t heard a thing about it from him. Nor has my staff heard from his staff,” McCain said of Cruz (R-Texas). “It came as a complete surprise to me that he had been pressing me. Maybe it was some medium that I’m not familiar with.” [...] McCain went to great lengths to ridicule Cruz for suggesting the two had discussed the issue. He joked that perhaps Cruz was bouncing messages off the “ozone layer.” “Maybe it was through, you know, hand telegraph. Maybe sign language,” McCain said. “Ask him how he communicated with me because I’d be very interested. Because who knows what I’m missing.”

He may be a presidential candidate, but at this point fellow senators are openly mocking Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz has been telling supporters that he's been "pressing" Sen. John McCain to hold hearings on gun restrictions on military bases (Cruz is ag'in em, obviously.) That's news to McCain, who takes the opportunity to lay into Cruz just for the fun of doing it That is not really the sort of soundbite you want to have hurled your way if you are trying to boost your presidential gravitas, but the anger most of his fellow senators hold towards Cruz, thanks to Cruz's repeated efforts to make them take rotten votes and support stupid things (see: shutdown) is probably not soothed in the slightest by Cruz now imagining himself worthy of even higher office.

Cruz now says he might have misspoken, and his office is now hard at work drafting a letter to McCain urging the thing they said they had already urged so that the next time Cruz uses the line he won't be a liar.

In the meantime, Cruz is pivoting to attack his fellow Republican would-be presidents for not defending guns vocally enough after the mass execution of elementary school children in Newtown, CT, momentarily made American's deep spiritual connections to their murder weapons look like a bad thing. They are innocent of this charge, I assure you—Rand Paul's own beliefs that American schoolchildren need to suck it up and learn to dodge better are well-established—but Cruz is still trying to stake a claim as being the most obsessive defender of guns in the race. Well, that and being the biggest liar, of course.