The far-right machine has a growing pain: no factory warranties.

The Texans who wish they could recall Sen. Ted Cruz are multiplying rapidly, even though he’s barely halfway through his first year in Congress. They are Texans who understand that any shutdown of the federal government would be a disaster for the global economy, as much as for the USA and its credit rating. As the nation that’s deepest in debt, any nick in that rating would push the debt much deeper and shake Wall Street and the banks to their foundations.

But that’s the gamble Cruz is running. As Congress closed for its traditional August recess, he accused fellow Republicans of suffering “Stockholm Syndrome” in backing away from a showdown with President Obama over the Continuing Resolution that would keep the government open to start the next fiscal year October l. He wants that resolution, which will be the most urgent business when Congress returns, to leave Obamacare unfunded.

From his first day in the Senate, Cruz has left no doubt that he’s running for president himself, and he’s banking his chances of grabbing the top of the 2016 Republican ticket on killing Obamacare. He doesn’t trust the American people. He fears that if they actually taste universal health care they’ll like it. After all, every other developed nation has it, and likes it.

Maybe what he really fears is the”Canadian Syndrome.” Not only are our neighbors to the north getting free health care, they have no national debt. Can’t they see the imperative of joining us in the endless arms race of corporate welfare? Could they possibly be safe without a closet full of firearms in every house? How can they sleep well without a National Rifle Association, maybe the KKK too, leading their neighborhood watches? Don’t they understand how much they owe us ― us being the shield that goes with being the last superpower?

The warrantless Cruz is now straddling a dilemma of his own making. The more he grows his rabid following on the right, the farther right it pulls him. His constant aim is to kill the Affordable Care Act, by choking off the funds that would get it moving. He can’t let people taste universal care. One taste could sell them. Only a spineless socialist would let people have what they want. But as cheers ring louder in his ears, he finds few Republicans in Congress siding with him.

The momentary or partial shutdown of the federal system that he would risk to stop Obamacare has drawn stinging rebukes. His GOP Red River neighbor, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, calls it a “dishonest” strategy. North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr sees it as “the dumbest idea I ever heard of.”  Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, Deputy Republican Whip in the House, characterizes it as “a suicidal political tactic.”

But there’s no slowing down this Tea Party honey, who sees himself as savior of both party and country, the Hispanic star who will by face and name alone turn all those Democrats of like heritage into Cruz Democrats, duplicating President Reagan’s success with the JoeSixPacks. He’s betting that by 2016 no one will remember his readiness to turn off Social Security checks just to keep Affordable Care unfunded. He’s sure the Tea Partiers will remember him as the candidate who would deliver the small government they dream of by giving them no government at all. After all, there is a faint current of the anarchist in the Tea Party makeup.

From his first days in the Senate, Cruz has not hesitated to upstage Texas’ senior senator. Even though Sen. John Cornyn has given Texas high visibility and leverage as Deputy Leader of the Senate Republicans, first-term Cruz turned brash in his first months, daring to lecture the Senate on its misguided ways of doing business. How does such an ego expect to soon capture the grandest popularity contest of all?

Now the Texas senators are on opposite sides of the threatened shutdown. Todd Gillman, who covers Washington for the Dallas Morning News, wrote August 4 that Senator Cornyn “spent his week tamping down right-wing dismay over his refusal to join that burn-the-house-down approach.” Of Obamacare, he said, “I want to fight this monstrosity as much as anybody, but I want to make sure we fight smartly.”

But Cruz has been joined by fellow Tea Party Sen. Mike Lee of Utah in targeting the Continuing Resolution to keep the government running after October l. Their game plan is to line up enough Republicans to kill it by filibuster. But they’ve overlooked a minor detail. Their primary target, the Affordable Care Act, which the Supreme Court has already found constitutional, was enacted with its funding largely on auto-pilot. Gillman writes:

“The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service underscored that in the report issued Monday.   Democrats project a smug confidence that the law is impervious to the sort of assault Cruz proposes..  .  . Cornyn  spent the week citing the report, and noting that shutdowns have backfired on congressional Republicans.”

The DMN further notes that “Cornyn is plenty conservative. He rarely shuns from ideological fights” ― but hardly conservative enough for the junior senator, who counts on all the headlines he’s making to lock up the Tea Party favor that will put him atop the GOP ticket in 2016. He never misses a chance to preach the Tea Party line, “We want our country back.” They count on the people missing how little the phrase meets reality. Which country is it they want back? The one that defined blacks as only three-fifths human, and counted women not at all? Or the one that pressed children into factory labor? Or the one that let few but the privileged into college and the professions?

Time is not his friend.  If the CR has the government running as usual on October l, the state insurance exchanges that Affordable Care then opens will start enrolling participants. And preexisting conditions will no longer be denied coverage for those enrolling. So Cruz is using the five-week recess to barnstorm the country with former Sen. Jim Demint, now president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, who gladly joins him in pushing for a grassroots groundswell against the expanded health coverage.

However, the Affordable Care partisans have their own push spreading across the States to explain the coverage and answer criticism. Their numbers may enable them to upstage Cruz and Demint all along the road. With the fastest growing retirement population, Texans should be thankful that Cruz will not succeed in closing the government October l and leaving all those checks un-mailed. They are not just the checks to seniors but the much fatter ones to weapons makers, and the precious ones that feed the outsized concentration of major military bases and personnel that Texas proudly hosts.

How long will Cruz’ ego keep him talking and acting against the better interests of his State? Fellow Texans in large numbers will go along, somehow thinking that the Lone Star State can always have it both ways: milking federal programs with both hands, while branding the cow as a menace to the people. But the other States aren’t going along. Cruz so plainly wears the bigger-than-life Texas bearing that people elsewhere want no part of. It’s a hard lesson of politics that’s coming his way, and he’s likely to get through it too late to help his chances in 2016. The bandwagon he counts on riding very soon ― sporting the made-in-Texas flag on the hood ― could by the 2014 primaries be bumping along on four flat tires.

Frank Mensel ― August 2013

For Americans fond of pro sports, who see them as fabric of Americana, the recurring scandals over performance-enhancing drugs could hardly be more galling. To such fans, there is no stardom or career more privileged and envied than the big-league athlete, whatever the sport.

Professional sports have become big business — not one great industry, but several — solely because of fan support. Football has become the largest entertainment investment, even as baseball and basketball draw larger total audiences. These enormous audiences have every right to feel betrayed by the players who use drugs they think might give them an edge in the game.

What the fans can’t forgive is gifted people behaving so selfishly and stupidly that they make a joke of both their talent and the game that rewards them so handsomely. And the industries themselves can afford it even less. Players who make fools of the game and themselves make fools of the fans also. To fail to act is to make P.T. Barnum right: suckers born every minute.

Major League Baseball finds itself now embroiled in a doping scandal it not only must put to rest, but also must cremate, to avoid becoming ashes itself.  As many as a score of stars and other players currently on Major League rosters purportedly have been doing business with a drug dealer in Florida, who wants to head off a lawsuit against him by naming names.

The game’s integrity will be tested by the harshness of the penalties. If Pete Rose, the all-time hits leader, can be banned from the Hall of Fame for gambling on games during his playing days, should the dopers fare any better?

Frank Mensel — August, 2013

Texas and its people love things large. Even their contradictions.

The splendorous new proof is the George W. Bush Presidential Library on the Southern Methodist University campus.

Embarrassment found its place among the mixed emotions that swelled the recent dedication of the controversial library. It is inescapable for the Texans who wish that GWB wasn’t a Texan. They know that, with or without the library, history will not be kind to GWB.

It’s a legacy that shows his White House was sometimes its own enemy, trapped in contradictions, even lies of its own making. It left a record for which a kind word would be inconsistency. But history is more likely to find it the most dangerous and destructive presidency the nation has seen.

But too little of it is “seen” that way in the GWB Library. It will mock the word itself, in the eyes of countless visitors.

Contradiction marked the very beginning of his administration. He struck an immediate theme that surely awakened the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt: “Compassionate conservatism.” As dubious as was his election itself, settled not by the popular vote or any recount of it but by a shaky 5-4 ruling from the Supreme Court barring any recount, that theme made a favorable first impression.

But it was soon erased by his insistence on across-the-board tax cuts that no one had asked for.  He took office with the benefit of the budget surpluses that President Clinton and Congress had built in Clinton’s second term, which were a hopeful beginning at controlling the towering national debt, most of which developed under President Reagan and his neocon government.

Once enacted, the GWB tax cuts doomed any hope of “compassion” for less-advantaged people. The budget surpluses he inherited were succeeded by deficits of unprecedented size and duration, taking away President Reagan’s distinction as the only Republican president to double the national debt. It was more than doubled again in the GWB presidency. But you won’t find this feat enshrined in the new SMU library.

Giving the Supreme Court the benefit of the doubt, the justices failed to see that their 5-4 vote stopping any recount of the indecisive 2000 election and making GWB the unelected winner would put the White House in the hands of warmongers.

Even before the inauguration, the team of Bush-Cheney-Rusmfeld was drawing up the game plan to invade Iraq. They had convinced themselves that the annihilation of the notorious dictator Saddam Hussein would put every other dictator on notice that their rule was at risk.

Their strategy for getting the people and the Congress behind such a plan became obvious. Pick the most plausible big lie. One very unreliable source had provided it. But its very appearance was ample excuse. Insist that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, and send Secretary of State Powell to the United Nations to tell the world just that. Powell was in doubt, but having won rank of full general as a team player, he gave the Bush team the benefit of the doubt.

The invasion that followed was meant to how the nation the “shock and awe” that comes of being the world’s lone enduring superpower.  But instead we live with the shock and awe of the longest war of our history, only to see our intervention in Afghanistan lasting even longer. Each carries a price tag of more than a trillion dollars, and still counting at both. The GWB White House never asked the nation for the sacrifices that make victory possible. Victory continues to elude us.

Such is the legacy of the GWB presidency: unsettled wars, mounting deficits and debt, a no-growth middle class incapable of taming public and private debt, a declining industrial base, a financial-world saved from its collapse by CPR from the Federal Reserve and the next administration, a boom-bust in housing that still leaves legions of mortgages “under water,” and the lingering Great Recession, whose numbers of jobless and poor far exceed the deepest of the Great Depression.

The impression that GWB bore little or no sense of responsibility for any of this may become history’s sternest indictment. The dedication of his library carried an air of forgiveness, in which the other four surviving presidents found kind words for the occasion. Any other mood would have been imprudent, since that foursome included GWB’s own father. History is almost certain to tell us soon that Bush I was a finer man and a finer president than the son.

It may well prove that both scholarship and history are better served by SMU’s acceptance of the library. Among the better private universities in the scholarly rank of its faculty, it is likely to see  its faculty dig deeper and deeper over time into the weaknesses of this presidency, including its contradictions and its indifference to both justice and the general welfare. The prouder faculty are doubtless unwilling to see either their reputation or that of SMU tarnished by their silence on GWB’s impetuous and careless leadership. Hopefully, they will pull no punches on either the president or VP Cheney.

The library poses an interesting test of the ability of Texans generally to be honest with themselves about this legacy. I for one have no doubt that the GWB presidency will eventually rank as the most dangerous and destructive the nation has seen. The nation and its capitalist system of consumer economics will be sorely tested in the 21^st century to recover from the Bush debachles the strength they reached in the 20^th century.

Frank Mensel — May 2013