“You take a guy like Cruz, people are liking the Cruz — they think he’s for the free market, and [in reality] he’s owned by Goldman Sachs. I mean, he and Hillary have more in common than we would have with either Cruz or Trump or any of them so I just don’t think there is much picking,” Paul said of the Texas senator on Fox Business’ “Varney & Company” on Friday. Surprisingly, the elder Paul seemed more attracted to the views of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in the Democratic primary. “On occasion, Bernie comes up with libertarian views when he talks about taking away the cronyism on Wall Street, so in essence he’s right, and occasionally he voted against war,” the former Texas congressman said when asked if there was a candidate who was truly for the free market.

As far as I can tell, Ted Cruz’s connection with Goldman Sachs is that his wife took a job with that company shortly after she married Cruz (she is no longer employed by them) and Cruz took out a loan from Goldman Sachs for his primary challenge to David Dewhurst.

Going into tonight’s G.O.P. debate, in South Carolina, the Times story is the talk of the political class. The author, Mike McIntire, revealed that, in 2012, Cruz used a loan that his wife took out from Goldman to help to finance his successful Senate campaign, during which he honed his reputation as a critic of bank bailouts and corporate cronyism. The Goldman loan, which was for between two hundred and fifty thousand and half a million dollars, wasn’t disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, as it should have been. Rather than publicly acknowledging its existence, Cruz subsequently told reporters that he and his wife had liquidated practically all of their personal savings to help pay for the campaign. Based on McIntire’s inspection of the annual ethics reports that Cruz and other Senators are obliged to file, which require them to list all of the assets they own, this appears to have been a fib. In addition to taking out the loan from Goldman in 2012, which was a margin loan attached to a brokerage account, the Cruzes took out a credit line, of similar size, from Citibank. Between the beginning and end of 2012, the value of the cash and securities that the family owned didn’t diminish to zero, or anything near it. Rather, it “saw a net increase of as much as $400,000,” McIntire reported.

That loan was secured by his own assets and has since been repaid. It was a commonsense move that did not result in his family finances being crippled by his campaign. If you have a home equity loan you’ve done much the same thing.

The fact that Paul finds financial prudence deplorable and finds a mangy old Bolshevik to be admirable speaks to the point that we’ve made on RedState for years. Ron Paul is a fraud. His political life was a fraud. He preyed on his supporters and left the politics of the nation much more poisonous than he had found it.