So, I guess what happens next is that all of those conservatives who obsessed over Barack Obama's eligibility as president will start to demand similar investigations into the background of the Canadian-born Ted Cruz, who last night announced his candidacy for president of the United States.
Any day now, Donald Trump will dispatch detectives to Cruz' birthplace of Calgary. Orly Taitz will file lawsuits insisting that it doesn't matter that Cruz, like Obama, was born to an American mother. Fox News will use hours of airtime to remind us that Cruz' father came from a communist country and even fought for Fidel Castro, insinuating that his candidacy is some anti-American conspiracy coming to fruition. And we'll be reminded that "Ted" isn't even the man's real name, that according to his birth certificate he's really the much more foreign-sounding "Rafael Cruz".
That is, if you are fool enough to believe that Canadian "birth certificate" is real in the first place.
As we all know, however, none of that will happen. Cruz cannot become the target of the paranoid wing of American politics because he is already its folk hero. He is America's stalwart defender against the dark, secret forces attempting to undermine it from within. He rings the alarm bell against the United Nation's insipid "Agenda 21", that “globalist plan that tries to subvert the U.S. Constitution and the liberties we all cherish as Americans.” He warns against the "enormous problem" of Sharia law in this country, and demands the repeal of "every word" of the federal legislation that imposes Common Core on the American people. In his world, and in the world of those who support him, the fact that no such legislation actually exists is a mere technicality raised by those who want only to confuse the situation.
It would be foolish to question the authenticity of such a national archetype, descended as he is from the likes of Joseph McCarthy, Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin and Georgia's own Eugene Talmadge. Three things about Cruz are all equally true; He was born in Canada, he will never be president, and he is thoroughly, completely American.
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