Ted Cruz, Patriot (Unlike Some People)

By Bill Maher

Ted Cruz is the newly minted, teabag-endorsed, junior senator from Texas. He's a Canadian-born Harvard Law graduate, but he speaks fluent shit-kicker. And he doesn't cotton to pussies, fairies and she-men like Chuck Hagel and John Kerry.

On Saturday, he was speaking to the National Review Institute, in Washington, D.C., and he said [at 37:10 in the video]: "We've got two pending nominations, John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Both of whom are very prominently [pause] less than ardent fans of the U.S. military."

He got a pretty good laugh from the crowd, but he didn't kill. Unlike John Kerry and Chuck Hagel. Still, you can see his point. Only wimpy America-hating liberal limp-wrists actually serve their country in combat. That's not what a patriot does. A real patriot is an ardent fan. 

It's like he saw my editorial at the end of last Friday's Real Time and decided, Saturday morning, to act it out: You don't prove you're a man by fighting. You prove you're a man by writing Lockheed a blank check.

People say America is a violent country, but Ted Cruz accused wounded Vietnam vets John Kerry and Chuck Hagel of having insufficient patriotic pep, as opposed to Ted Cruz, and so far no one has punched him in the face.

I think that says something pretty nice about Vietnam vets.

Ted Cruz is 42 years old. So he wasn't born when Chuck Hagel won two Purple Hearts in Vietnam and John Kerry won three. You get those for being wounded in action, but maybe Ted doesn't know that. And I'm not saying you don't get to have an opinion about war if you weren't a soldier. I'm just saying, it's an odd world where a guy can be a senator for a month and start doing eye-rolls at John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, as if they obviously have mouse balls.

If I were Ted Cruz, and I was waiting for the elevator, and the doors opened, and Hagel or Kerry was the only other passenger, I'd probably take the stairs.