On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Joe Scarborough lashed out at Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas for his criticism of his own party in debt-ceiling negotiations.
Responding to Cruz’s comment that he did not trust the GOP to be an arbiter in the debt debate. Scarborough predicted Cruz’s “self-righteous” demeanor would be his ultimate undoing as a member of the U.S. Senate.
“It’s going to be a hell of a lot of fun when Ted Cruz is standing in line in the cloak room to get hot dogs,” Scarborough said. “This is a guy that has obviously decided he is going to be a lone wolf and you can be a lone wolf … Anyway, Mike Allen, this guy has obviously got no interest in working with any of his colleagues. He’s certainly… The people of Texas are going to find out in a very rude way that pissing off 97 senators, basically saying you’re the — I mean this guy is more self-righteous in politics than Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker were in religion — this is going to blow up in his face. We all know it. But somebody apparently hasn’t told Ted Cruz that he wasn’t the first person ever elected to the United States Senate. I can’t believe this will do anything but devastate his effectiveness and hurt the great people in Texas in the long run.”
In typical Scarborough fashion, the former Florida congressman reflected back on his time in the U.S. House of Representatives to explain where Cruz is going wrong.
“It’s very clear — when you go in there are two doors and only two doors. There’s the insider door and there is the outsider door. And when you go in, you can decide to be part of the establishment, you can decide to be part of the leadership, you can decide to be the ones that go to all of the fundraisers, that raise all of the money and do the dirty work for the leaders. If you go in there, you’ve got to go in there 100 percent or you’re an outsider, which obviously Ted Cruz has done.”
“And you’ve got to be an outsider. Listen — yeah, Dick Armey, when I was in Congress, he didn’t like me. John Boehner didn’t like me, Newt Gingrich,” he continued. “The leadership didn’t like me because I decided I would be an outsider. I was going to vote the way I wanted to vote. I was going to go after them hard when they spent too much money. But, at the same time, I was quietly making relationships with basically everybody else in the House. So people in my district didn’t get punished for my conservative activism. That’s not happening here and that’s why I think at the end of the day the big losers are going to be the great people in the state of Texas because Ted Cruz has gone to Texas as a political branding device instead of being a leader to help people in that huge important great state.”
