Republicans straining to accept Ted Cruz need to get a load of his fiery paternal speaking surrogate. Photo: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As the options for nominating someone other than Donald Trump have diminished, a lot of Republican Establishment types are beginning to join their conservative-movement friends in or near the camp of Senator Ted Cruz. Most of them really dislike the guy, if only because they think he’s too smart to believe the demagogic attacks he’s used to torment congressional Republican leaders. Many also no doubt think he’s got some serious electability issues. Still, with Lindsey Graham leading the way, they are coming around.

But you have to imagine this conversation happening more than once:

ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICAN: Okay, I’m ready to climb on board and maybe bring some friends and donors along. But I do have one question. CRUZ OPERATIVE: What would that be? We’re not talking Cabinet posts or ambassadorships just yet, though we’ll be glad to record your preferences. ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICAN: No, that’s not it. CRUZ OPERATIVE: Is it the “54 million evangelicals who sat out 2012” thing? He’s stopped saying that. ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICAN: God, I had forgotten about that one! No, that’s not it, either. I know this is kind of sensitive, but … is there any chance Ted could send his father on a fact-finding mission to Paraguay or something between now and November?

Without question, the Reverend Rafael Cruz is a bit much to swallow for anyone struggling to digest his son as an acceptably mainstream Republican candidate for president. Throughout Ted’s political career, Rafael has made it clear (and had countless opportunities to make it clear as Ted’s preferred speaking surrogate) that he raised the boy to become the divinely appointed instrument for the redemption of his adopted country from the godless baby-killing Marxists controlling American government and certainly the secular-socialist Democrat Party.

And now the fiery septuagenarian is at it again, as reported by Miranda Blue of RightWingWatch:

“One more liberal justice with that way of thinking and we will lose our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms,” Cruz said on Breitbart’s SiriusXM program. “And think back in history: Every dictator that has taken the guns away from the population has used them against the population. …” Cruz also repeated his claim that the American public education system is being used by communists to indoctrinate children into “an anti-Christian worldview.” “What has happened in America is that we have believed this lie of separation of church and state, which is not in the Constitution, is not in the Declaration,” Cruz said. “The total opposite is true.” He went on to say that this all changed when the Humanist Manifesto, an “ominous document,” was signed in 1933, leading to “immorality and chaos and secular humanism.” He then repeated his claim that John Dewey, the public education reformer and signer of the Humanist Manifesto “was a member of the American Communist Party.” (Dewey was in fact an “avowed anti-Communist.”) All of this, he said, has led to the Common Core educational standards “brainwashing” public school students with an “anti-Christian worldview in an attempt to secularize America.”

Ol’ Rafael’s conviction that America was born a theocracy isn’t terribly surprising, since the father of that particular lie, pseudo-historian David Barton, is the coordinator for Ted Cruz’s super-PACs. The Common-Core-as-anti-Christian thing is really nuts, since Common Core was originally the product of a marriage between big business and virtually every U.S. governor.

If Ted Cruz is going to be sanitized for mainstream Republicans and swing voters before and (if he’s successful) after Cleveland, somebody needs to convince his father that the odds of him having the opportunity to rant and rave in the White House are significantly reduced every time he opens his mouth during his son’s campaign. The senator has enough of his own words to eat without a heaping helping of his father’s.