This is what happens when you dedicate your entire political career to alienating anyone who can do you any good. You wind up in a death struggle with a vulgar talking yam and nobody has your back. In fact, more than a few people who might've helped you out, had you not been a dickhead big enough to have been carved by a Borglum, actually start whispering that, hey, you know that vulgar talking yam has a point here.

Welcome to NFL football, Tailgunner Ted Cruz.

It has not been a good week for the Tailgunner, poll numbers in Iowa notwithstanding. I agree with Steve M. that the revelation that his first Senate campaign was an upset financed largely with help from Goldman Sachs, where his wife is in upper management, is not likely to hurt him with the base voters. I would go further and say that it's not going to hurt him in the general election, either, except in the unlikely event that he's running against Bernie Sanders. Call me cynical, but I don't see Hillary Rodham Clinton attacking anyone for their closeness to Wall Street without half the country dissolving in what my mother used to call HIGH-sterics. Still, having your lift-off bankrolled by the Great Vampire Squid does lend a kind of distinctly non-populist stench to the enterprise.

Then there's the risible campaign commercial in which the Tailgunner dresses up in camo and face paint and hangs out in the blind with the Duck Dynasty crew, looking like a G.I. Joe who's lost his kung-fu grip on his senses. Or like a Raiders fan. I haven't made up my mind.

But what is most characteristic of the carnival that He, Trump has made of this race is the fact that the notion that Cruz is disqualified from being president because he is Canadian by birth has gained some actual traction beyond the hootin' and hollerin' at the various stops along the Trumpapalooza Tour Of The Americas, '16. Because He, Trump understands the highly evolved role of shiny objects in our national politics better than anyone else ever has, he just threw that thing out there for laughs, and now people are earnestly pondering why the Founders left such an important point so utterly ambiguous.

(I have only two possible answers: A. they had a completely unfounded faith that subsequent generations could figure it out on their own, or B. they were just fcking with posterity the way they did with the Electoral College.)

For example, Josh Marshall's joint has an interview with a constitutional scholar who argues that Cruz's problem dates far back in British common law. Oliver Cromwell figures in there somewhere, as he usually does, the genocidal bastard. Anyway, the point is that, almost out of nowhere, Ted Cruz has an actual problem here and, as we said, when he looks to see who has his back, there's a vast expanse of nothing with some giggles coming from somewhere in the distant dark.

Though the framers didn't incorporate the entire body of English common law and statutory law into the Constitution, when they did include a common law term, they meant for it to be interpreted by the common law definition—an idea the Supreme Court has repeatedly re-enforced, McManamon explained.

"What Clement and Katyal and virtually everybody else who writes in the area look at is what happened with Queen Anne and George II and George III, and [they] say, 'Oh the common law is different, therefore that's what we adapted,'" McManamon said. "But we didn't when you read the words of James Madison and you read the congressmen debating statutes." She cited James Kent and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story—American legal scholars who wrote early histories of the Constitution—as well as the words of Madison himself as supporting a more narrow definition of who can become president. "They say clearly that you have to be born within the U.S., and if you are naturalized by any statute—whether it's by birth, because you're born to a natural born parent, or otherwise—you can't be president," she said. "They're very specific about that."

You think He, Trump knew all this when he threw it out there? Please. He was just stirring the pot. But what he did know was that the press would chew on the issue for a week or two because he knows how the news-entertainment dynamic works. So, good luck, Tailgunner. You're playing on his field now. Because we are always here to help, we present you the Archbishop of Canterbury from Henry V with some possible counter-persiflage you can use. No need to thank us.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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