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(Photo: Dustin Johnston)It makes perfect sense for Senator Ted Cruz to have chosen to make his formal announcement that he is running for the Republican Party's 2016 presidential nomination in front of an audience at the late Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, the largest Christian university in the country. Cruz, who comes out of the conservative evangelical Christian Right, is going to be courting white evangelical Christian primary voters, so he might as well get started revving up their engines.

Cruz supporters see him as a highly intelligent and articulate spokesperson with an impressive academic background, and a man who is willing to take a principled stand, and stick by it regardless of the circumstances. Many on the left -- as well as some on the establishment right – tend to dismiss Cruz as a buffoon, a self-promoting carnival barker who not only goes off the rails, and is proud to live off the rails.

As is often the case, researcher and investigative journalist Bruce Wilson is cutting through what I am calling "The Fog of Ted Cruz."

In a recent Talk2Action post titled "Ted Cruz: Born From The Heart of the Dominionist Christian Right," Wilson pointed out that both Cruz, and his father Rafael, are steeped in the politics of the Religious Right. Wilson wrote that they both have deep "ties to the dominionist Christian right," and have "made frequent public appearances ... onstage with leaders from the most extreme factions of the Christian right."

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Let's back up a bit: In a story dated October 8, 2013, Wilson reported that in Timothy Goeglein's 2011 book, Goeglein, President George W. Bush's liaison to the Religious Right before he was forced to resign over a plagiarism scandal, revealed that "back in 1999 Cruz already had high-level national-level political connections that helped make George W. Bush president -- connections perhaps developed during his stint as a legal aide for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, but most certainly also tracing through his father Rafael Cruz' participation in the Paul Weyrich-cofounded Religious Roundtable that mobilized Christian conservative voters to help elect Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980."

Wilson: "In 1999 Cruz, then a George W. Bush campaign aide" arranged "a meeting between one of the key architects of the movement, Paul Weyrich - who played a pivotal role in drawing evangelicals into electoral politics - and Goeglein." Weyrich, often considered the Godfather of the New Religious Right, was a key figure in the founding of the Heritage Foundation, the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

In his book, Man In The Middle - An Inside Account of Faith and Politics in the George W. Bush Era, Timothy Goeglein wrote:

"In addition to the strong support Governor Bush was garnering in those early primaries, he was also gaining the support of key social conservatives in a systematic but off-the-record outreach effort where I was spending lots of my time. One of the most important such meetings occurred a month after I arrived in Austin. My friend and fellow campaign aide Ted Cruz ... phoned me one day and told me Paul Weyrich, one of the leading traditional conservatives in the country, was in Austin and wanted to have breakfast to discuss Governor Bush's record and the campaign. Ted asked me to join him. Paul, who later became a close friend and ally, had a reputation for blunt talk and core, unswerving convictions, and so I knew the meeting would be foundational to our coalition efforts in the Bush campaign.

"We met for a breakfast ... [that] ended up going nearly three hours. Paul queried me and Ted on nearly every issue possible in a spirited, lively session. I came to see the repartee among the three of us was rooted in common principles and values; and by the end of the breakfast, Paul told us, in all his years of following presidential politics, he had never felt more comfortable with the core convictions of a candidate on the issue he most believed in, the sanctity of every human life, the foundation of the traditional family, and American sovereignty. The breakfast ended in unity and common purpose. This kind of one-on-one outreach was a cornerstone of the first Bush campaign, and conservative support was one of the keys to victory."

The Christian right credentials of Ted Criz's father are unassailable. He, along with Weyrich founded the Religious Roundtable, one of the Christian right's earliest political organizations. His rhetoric, however, is often off the charts. It will be interesting to see what role he plays in his son's campaign.