Is this really as daring as Beltway opinionating gets? Dana Milbank:
Condemning Obama for failing to enforce the Syrian red line after blocking him from enforcing the very same red line? This is vintage Cruz, who I’ve long suspected to be a charlatan.
Long suspected?
Milbank attempts to mitigate his confession of an oddly prolonged suspicion by disclosing that he first met Cruz 15 years ago, when the latter worked on W.'s presidential campaign "as a young striver, not a hard-edged ideologue." Hence, or so goes the implication, there was little cause for reasonable doubt as to the man's integrity. But then came Cruz's own political rise, first with the tea party and then with the hawks — and Milbank's suspicions commenced.
They should have come to their inevitable conclusion immediately. For to have even brushed against the senatorial Cruz is to know he's a charlatan. To write that "I once suspected" Cruz of charlatanism is one thing, since it admits a suspicion long lapsed. But to write that "I have" suspected him of it is quite another, since it implies that mere suspicion has lingered into the present. And dear Holy Mother of God, how could anyone of clear mind have been in any doubt for these past three years?
I appreciate that picking on a columnist for a verb tense seems like a minor, or even petty, thing. But here, I suspect that Milbank wrote "I have long suspected" so as to avert, in a rather namby-pamby way, the unmistakably declarative: "Ted Cruz is a charlatan."