Till now, Ted Cruz has always straddled the line between traditional conservatism and the left-wing liberal internationalist movement known as "neo" conservatism.

No more. Cruz has sold his soul to the neocons.

That became obvious the other day when Cruz announced a team of foreign-policy advisers with some of the nuttiest neocons in America on it.

Among them is Elliott Abrams, who is so completely neoconservative that he practically defines the term.

Then there is Frank Gaffney, who set something of a new standard for neocon nuttiness when he argued that Saddam Hussein was behind the bombing of that federal building in Oklahoma for which Timothy McVeigh was executed.

And then there's Andrew McCarthy, who showed he has a deep understanding of the law when he was the prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing.

Unfortunately McCarthy has no understanding whatsoever of foreign affairs and the military. His main criticism of George W. Bush's Iraq invasion was that Bush didn't go on to attack Iran.

It didn't seem to occur to McCarthy that conquering countries is easy. But then you have to occupy them. That's hard.

People are making fun of Donald Trump for saying his favorite foreign-policy adviser is himself. But you'd get better foreign-policy advice from a homeless guy on the corner than you'd get from those three.

I guess Cruz must be desperate to get support wherever he can, given his dismal position in this race at the moment.

His people have been trying to sell us on the idea Cruz could win California. The latest poll shows him at 22 points there.

Bad as that is, it's much better than he's doing in New York, where he comes in at 12 points. The Donald has comfortable leads in both states.

That might explain Cruz's picks for foreign policy. I don't know what else could. Certainly not mere stupidity and ignorance. Cruz is a smart guy and he has to know that his own prior positions are contradicted by these three characters.

Cruz's defenders, for example, say that he was wise enough to warn against intervening in Libya and Syria.

They also cite his statement that the U.S. should stop toppling secular dictators because of the debacles that brought on in the Mideast.

But these liberal internationalists all support that sort of goo-goo-eyed approach to foreign affairs. All have embraced the idea that once a dictator is deposed, representative democracy will spring up spontaneously.

Abrams: "It's time to bury the unreal, failed 'realism' of those who have long thought that dictators brought stability."

Actually it's time to resurrect it after the debacles in Iraq, Libya and Egypt.

And then there's Syria. This is a country that represents not the slightest threat whatsoever to the U.S. In fact Syria was part of our coalition in the first Gulf War.

Yet in 2001 Gaffney signed on to a letter from the Project for a New American Century - otherwise known as "Neocon Central" - that called for the U.S. to go after Syria.

The PNAC was instrumental in getting Bush to declare an open-ended and unwinnable "War on Terrorism" as opposed to a simple war on Al Qaeda.

Gaffney also was part of an effort to tie Saddam to the 9/11 attacks. But things really got weird with the 1995 Oklahoma bombing. After an Oklahoma TV reporter dreamed up an Iraq connection to the destruction of the Murrah Building with a fertilizer bomb, Gaffney wrote a piece in 2002 pushing that theory as a means of getting Bush to invade Iraq.

He didn't say how Saddam smuggled all that fertilizer into America. By flying saucer? Could be.

By the way, a lot of people mistakenly conclude that these neocons are conservative simply because they often express such hostility to Islamists and Sharia Law.

Nonsense. That doesn't make them conservative.

It makes them stupid. First they claim that most Muslims support such institutions as Sharia Law.

Then they claim that we should give these people free elections - so they can institute Sharia Law.

That's what was happening in Egypt until a secular dictator ended that neocon experiment in human liberation.

I wrote a number of pieces debunking that idiocy from the beginning, all based on my interviews with the "realists" so despised by Abrams and Co.

(Perhaps the most realists of the realists, former Vietnam Green Beret and Mideast veteran Pat Lang, takes on the Cruz decision in his blog: "Oddly, I know all these men. Where did I go wrong? Ah, too much time inside the Beltway! These four men collectively summon up images from the history channel, and they are not good images.")

To Trump's credit, he's the only candidate on the GOP side who blames Bush for screwing up the Mideast with this loony left philosophy. As far back as 2004, he was saying the exercise in nation-building in Iraq was doomed.

To Cruz's discredit, he stood there like a potted plant when that came up in a recent debate. And as far as I can determine he refrained from criticizing the Iraq War until last year, after Jeb Bush made that gaffe about how he would still have gone in "knowing what we know now."

And then there was his call for "carpet-bombing" ISIS, which former CIA spy Larry Johnson points out is both a war crime and thoroughly moronic because it would kill the innocent civilians we want to protect from ISIS

It might have been interesting if Cruz had put just one of the people Abrams derides as a "realist" on this panel. If he had consulted with any of the ex-spies or ex-military men I speak to regularly, they would have laughed out loud at the mere mention of the names of these three.

Instead he named a bunch of non-expert "experts" with the obvious goal of getting campaign contributions from all of those Beltway insiders who push for endless war in the Mideast to serve their own interests.

But there's not enough money in Washington to put him ahead of the Donald in the delegate count. All he can hope to do is help the insiders keep Trump from getting a first-ballot win so they can put in a more compliant candidate.

In doing so, Cruz has lost all credibility among conservatives.