TEXAS MONTHLY’S FIELD GUIDE TO TED CRUZ. Note this excerpt:

I’m not ideological about intelligence. In my view, it comes in many forms and none of them have a moral valence. So when I say that Cruz is smarter than us, I don’t mean it to imply a value judgment or even a contrast with other politicians. What I mean is that Cruz has the particular form of intelligence that is universally recognized as such, and he has it in abundance. This is just how it is. I feel no need to deny it, and I see no purpose to doing so.

Instead, I proceed on the assumption that Cruz is smarter than me—not that he’s a superior human who Americans should follow blindly, and not that he’s always right. Just that he’s smarter than me. In practice, that means when Cruz says or does something that doesn’t make sense to me, I ask myself what I’m missing. I take a step back and slowly puzzle through why a very smart person with certain well-documented strategic objectives would do that. Lord knows this is not my usual practice with politicians, but it has turned out to be a surprisingly effective technique for analyzing Cruz. I highly recommend it.

Ahh, beyond the cheap Canadian jokes, that explains the template that will be used by the DNC-MSM to attack Cruz, should he win the nomination, since the MSM of course funnels all Republicans into two binary categories, evil and stupid:

  • Calvin Coolidge: Stupid.
  • Herbert Hoover: Evil.
  • Eisenhower: Stupid.*
  • Nixon: Eeeeeeeviiiiiilllll.
  • Ford: Stupid.
  • Reagan: Stupid and evil.
  • GHWB: (Tough for the MSM to decide. Two guesses as to which template they used for Quayle.)
  • GWB: Stupid. (The MSM had Cheney to project their evil upon.)

On the other hand, if anybody can hold his own against the MSM, it’s Ted Cruz, who wisely front-loaded his critique of the DNC-MSM with his pushback against the buffoonish CNBC debate moderators before his potential campaign begins in earnest.

* No really, despite having then-recently won a minor bit of overseas unpleasantness called World War II due to his organizational genius, Ike was seen as quite dim by many Stevenson-supporting ‘50s lefties.