Ted's A Mess...

The #CruzSexScandal bomb has exploded all over Twitter, with a vengeance.  Reporter Adriana Cohen poked the tiger / spilled the beans directly @ Amanda Carpenter on Friday, March 25^th on CNN.  It was one of the most savage things I’ve seen on TV in forever, and I jumped up shrieking over the fact that someone actually had the sack to bring this thing up.  'Twas "Great Moments in Television" along the lines of the OJ Slow Speed Chase (and accompanying prank call "Bababooey to y'all!").

Carpenter’s body language - head twitch and shoulder roll / flinch - was a complete tell and if she could have incinerated Cohen with just the searing heat of hatred emanating from her eyes, she would have.  It looked as if Carpenter had taken a slug to the chest, frankly; she of course tried to downplay or hide her reaction to the gut-punch, but wasn't able to pull it off.  Carpenter seemed genuinely shocked that the subject would even be brought up, much less stated so starkly, live, on the air, on CNN.  In hindsight, it almost looked as if Carpenter, until the moment the projectile impacted her chest, was smugly certain she’d be safe from “that tabloid garbage” simply by proxy of being safely ensconced on CNN.  She was wrong though; so very, very wrong.

True to form, the internet immediately and savagely set upon Carpenter’s twitter feed, unearthing such gems as “Daddy Cruz is coming for you WaPo”, something about “on my way to steal your girl” as a hash tag under a picture of Cruz in what looked to be a military transport plane.  As an aside, if you still look like a complete tool whilst sitting on a military transport plane and sporting cop sunglasses, there's just no hope for you, bro.

There are many other Twitterific gems, including the April Fool's “matching Churchill tattoos, tee hee!” thing, the “odd that Ted would appear on TV in just his shirtsleeves and no jacket” / “hey, look at that masculine-looking jacket Amanda’s wearing in that pic while showing off the Churchill tat...on the same day, at the same hour as Teddy" and of course the "zomg, my friend loves cheese and tee hee, we're having some"…at 2am.  Guess they got started early that day.  There are more where those came from, but I can't be arsed to bother with them further.

Another player in the Mess That Is Ted is Liz Mair, who is also a MESS.  Mair's "ethics" (or rather, lack thereof - a deficit she brusquely explains away as brilliant political strategy) leave much to be desired.  She was the orchestrator of the "Naked Melania" slut-shaming bit in UT just prior to that state's primary.  The ad, featuring a naked Mrs. Trump, taken from a photoshoot done years ago, was put out by Mair's anti-Trump SuperPAC, "Make America Awesome".  Despite all of Mair’s smug, smarmy and frankly overly defensive and nasty protestations that Cruz was in no way involved, and that the PAC wasn't a pro-Cruz PAC, it’s pretty hard to argue that your trashy attack ad “wasn’t for Cruz!” when it says at the bottom of the ad “or you could vote for Cruz”.

Such a delight, Mair is.  How very fitting that she worked for some of the biggest pieces of shit in the game including Walker (from whose campaign she was fired on day 1) and Fiorina (that nasty dumpster fire of a witch); she leaves a trail of fail wherever she goes.  If it weren’t so blatantly offensive and ridiculous, it would be funny just how loudly Mair and people of her ilk are saying “you’re too stupid to see what’s right in front of your face” where the technicalities of who and what was behind the campaign.  For a brief moment the other day, I thought “ok, I see the logic in the strategy - presenting prim, proper Mormon women with eye-searing harlotry is, I suppose, a rather brilliant tactic.  But the more I thought about it, and more importantly, gained a better insight into how Mair operates and who she appears to be based on her own comments and ridiculous tweets, and I realized that she’s really just a super tacky, base bully of sorts.  Yuck.  Just, yuck.

Being the secret wus that I am (I try my best to stuff all of the feels where they belong - locked up tightly in a box, submerged in a vat of Vodka) I can’t help but empathize with the Cruz fans once in a great while (that is, until I remember their willful ignorance and straight up nastiness).  How horrible to have one’s illusions shattered to that degree?  To have an almost cult-leader-like faith in some ass-hat you’ve never even met, who professes to be Super God Squad No. 1 Fan, BFF of Jesus himself, purer than the driven snow, is probably akin to the faith or suspension of belief it takes to be a hardcore-(any religion).  The folks on Twitter who are hardcore in the tank for Cruz are freaking out - lashing out, staunchly entrenched in the denial and anger phases of denial.  And it just keeps getting better…or worse, depending on how you look at it.  Most recently, Cruz has been employing his usual dirty tricks to poach delegates and usurp the will of the people.  Color me not shocked.
Do we have anything aside from heresay to go on where Teddy's dabblings are concerned? Not really.
In a court of law, absent discovery and subpoenas, would this shit fly?  Not really sure, but I will say that when there is a pile of circumstantial evidence like there is here, it's certainly cause for concern, and I'm sure people have been convicted on far less for far greater crimes.  Realistically though, we, the jury of the Court of Public Opinion, have all seen this movie before.  We’ve seen stories like this spring to life, slowly at first - whispers, rumors within a closed community of colleagues; from there it becomes a Jean Natee commercial - I told two friends and they told two friends and they told two friends...etc., on and on, ad infinitum, until the entire internet - from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. to 8chan/pol/, the primordial soup of the internet from which all life forms spring, is ablaze with the internet equivalent of Morse code; dits dots dashes (read: 0s,1s) fly across the ether in a digital tsunami and the truth meter needle drifts precariously away from "omg, can't be true" to "wow, this is really starting to get some legs".  And then, the inevitable National Enquirer story is published, and I think we all know where it goes from there.