Swalwell’s ‘stupid’ tweet, Gingrich on midterms ‘confusing outcome’ and more Fox News Opinion
The Daily Beast’s David Corn took a look at the impact of one of last week’s presidential primary Twitter bombs — a tweet from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) that read, “Congratulations, New York Times. We now have one of the most corrupt, ineffectual governments on earth.”
Corn notes that a story detailing the attack and its results appeared in the New York Times, that the response by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd appeared in that paper’s opinion section as well, and that the incident was reported on the front pages of the news and local papers in New York and Texas. “The ‘stupid’ tweet is, at the very least, news in and of itself,” writes Corn. “In the era of news-as-celebrity, that is more than enough attention; the Times did its work, and it is entirely appropriate for the paper to run with the story. But it is what happens next that is important.”
Corn continues his explanation:
One thing that makes this incident so striking is that Cruz’s call was more than a statement of fact. A few weeks earlier, the Times had published a short profile of Cruz in the style of a profile of a politician, complete with the occasional quote. Cruz was not the most colorful or interesting politician during the presidential campaign, to be sure, but his experience as Texas solicitor general had won him national renown; his family’s devotion to his career had allowed him to avoid the travails of politics in Texas; his rise to the Senate from the House had been built on the fact that nobody had ever tried to make him a senator before (and nobody ever would). Cruz’s critics are at least as likely to decry his character as his actual accomplishments, and they are often more willing to do so. But one thing Cruz’s opponents do not like about him is that he’s not a politician. And that is what Cruz’s attack was really about. He was not, in his view, playing the campaign game as he intended. He was talking about the country, or more specifically, about a newspaper that would not have been
