Opinion / Commentary

Ted Cruz, accidental Canadian, hits the highway: Mallick

Texas Senator Ted Cruz has renounced citizenship. He’ll be sorry.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz would rather wrap himself in the Stars and Stripes than the Maple Leaf. (July 15, 2013)

Drew Angerer / GETTY IMAGES


So. Farewell then, Ted Cruz. You are leaving us for American buckshot, climes and unaffordable health care. Is it something we said?

Cruz, a Tea Partying senator from Texas — disliked by both Democrats and Republicans for being rude, rebarbative and patronizing, and also for his weird resemblance to Sen. Joe McCarthy — was born in Calgary. He is renouncing the Canadian citizenship he suddenly claims not to know he had been burdened with. He wants to be president, a job open only to natural-born Americans. How painful it must have been to be told “You’re Canadian. Polite. Mild-mannered.”

Sings he now “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain!” where once he sang “God keep our land glorious and free.”

Cruz’s new anthem has great adjectives. “Glorious and free” can hardly compete with “spacious, amber, purple and fruited.” But adjectives have not favoured Ted personally. Voters complain about your “greasy vibe,” MSNBC host Chris Matthews calls you a terrorist. “Because what the guy has done basically says, ‘my goals are, is demolition.’ Blow up health care. Blow up the continuing resolution. Bring the government to a standstill, and then make us forfeit on the national debt.”

Other voters don’t like your eyebrows, which look painted on. Cruz does bear a strange resemblance to silent star Rod La Rocque, who starred in 1928’s Captain Swagger and married Vilma Banky.

But Cruz also looks like a sweaty guy who owns a liquor store in Fort Salonga, sitting up all night with a gun hoping he’ll be called upon to test a Stand Your Ground law.

Cruz’s dual citizenship is anathema to his birther colleagues, who see him as their great semi-Hispanic hope to become president in 2016. Rand Paul/Ted Cruz, it’s a dream ticket if a mortifying defeat is what they’re after. Cuban-American Canadian doesn’t fit their narrative. (It verges on Kansas-Kenyan Hawaiian, if you know what I mean.)

Cruz has always suffered from dislocational disorder. He was born in Calgary to an American mother and a Cuban immigrant father who fought Batista, realizing too late that Castro was a land-confiscating communist. This was news to precisely no one else.

So Dad ended up in Calgary. Ted appeared, looked around and said, “Do you know what you’ve done to my presidential ambitions?” Cute kid. Zoom ahead to 2013. Cruz must make himself more American than Betsy Ross on a bun (white on white).

So he is renouncing us. How is this done? Easily, one assumed. “I renounce you, I renounce you, I renounce you,” he will say as they do in certain religious divorces.

As it turns out, Canadian officials are flummoxed. Last year, only 140 Canadians gave up citizenship in a snit. Earlier, one left for an ermine robe, and then baked in a Florida jail for years thinking how much nicer a Calgary prison would have been.

Ottawa is giving Cruz eight months to think it over, presumably to give him time for a free hip transplant. Cruz will get a going-over from CSIS and a chat with a citizenship court judge. He will be asked to explain his decision in writing.

Cruz hates Communists. We have no Communists here. Cruz says Harvard Law, where he studied, was packed with reds. He didn’t like Princeton either.

Cruz’s Princeton roommate, Craig Mazin, found him loony. “I remember very specifically that he had a book in Spanish and the title was Was Karl Marx a Satanist? And I thought, who is this person?” Mazin told the Daily Beast.

Again with the adjectives: “abrasive,” “intense,” “strident” and “arrogant.” Four people who were interviewed separately came up with “creepy.” Cruz would drape himself in a paisley bathrobe and walk to the end of the hallway where the female students lived, the Beast reported. The women asked Cruz’s roommate to make him stop.

“I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States. Anyone,” Mazin said. “I would rather pick somebody from the phone book.”

Off you go, Ted with your crazy dream for which I have other adjectives: doomed, Michele-Bachmann-level pointless, hucksterous, asinine.