It's not easy to think about something else when you have shampoo in your eye.
     I didn't intend a few days ago to watch twenty minutes of C-Span.  I had neared the end of my desire to pass through the fifty or so channels in my cable package, brain distracted by personal life thoughts, putting off doing a few things that needed doing that day.  Ted Cruz, however, was on the Senate floor, fulminating against the U.S. Supreme Court's 6-3 decision in favor of upholding the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).  Fascinated, I couldn't press on to another channel until I'd heard the man--like me, an American citizen born in Canada--speak and shout through a spiel so gravid with impassioned paranoid rhetoric it seemed a brood of demonic spawn were verging on breaching from his mouth. 
     Ted Cruz (Texas Republican, Latino ancestry, presidential candidate, McCarthyism practitioner) has one thing going for him as a public figure: the natural ability to speak, more as an entertainer than as a level-headed servant of the people--which he is not.  Charlatans, though, do have their believers.  A key power source fueling a crooked politician's engine is the gullibility of supporters acting from fear-based impulses supplied often by the same twisted motherfuckers they vote for. 
     Cruz would've flourished as a seventeenth century witch-hunting New England Puritan.  His attention-getting speaking style hinges on pointing to the problem, or "problem."  Aided by his buzz saw voice, he then builds a volcano of warning words leading to a spew and steady flow of invective at his target.  We're in a lot of trouble, people, because the Supreme Court has chosen to uphold an unconstitutional law that aims to, God help us, prevent poor Americans from dying for lack of affordable health care. 
     Cruz employs an old propaganda technique Josef Goebbels would've regarded as a first grade exercise: turn a positive into a negative by covering the truth of the matter with a rational-seeming argument many people will believe even though it smothers their best interests. 
     Cruz represents Texas, a state with lots of poor people whose lives can improve with the benefit of not having to worry about rich lawyers and politicians removing affordable care only to replace it with the nothing Republican lawmakers have for them.  When Cruz fired volcanic bombs at this latest humane decision by one of the three branches of U.S. government, he reflected the viewpoints of his fellow Republicans, whose motto in regard to affordable health care may as well be, "Kill the poor."
     If you have no money to pay a doctor's bill, or the cash to cover a visit to the emergency room (one of mine a few years ago, when I had no insurance, cost $1,200) you are fucked.  Mitt Romney, when he still lived in the delusional cloud convincing him he would win the presidency, said in 2012 that people without health insurance have the "option" of going to the emergency room.  These lucky people, I suppose the rich man thought, don't have to suffer their maladies alone in their homes when there are ambulances and hospitals.
     Sometimes, the American political situation, especially its protracted campaigns, seems like a movie, but unfortunately Romney, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, are real people representing "interests" that, like the Devil, employ lies to make it seem to some like we're all better off when tens of millions of people have to go into debt to save their own lives.
     The day of Cruz's speech, a typically smug Fox News Channel business show host used an expression that's becoming a right wing cliché: "No one is dying in the streets," referring to those needing health care so badly they're like cardboard pieces and empty soda bottles blown around on the concrete.  It's generally true, though.  Poor sick people don't die in, or rather on, the street, but they die in apartments and houses because they're unable to afford a medical specialist's attention.  How many Americans have been unhealthy, and sliding towards death for the past decades and centuries of no affordable health care law?  Osama bin Laden would've been pleased to kill even a hundredth of that mysterious vast number of ignored Americans of which I was one.
     Fuck you, Ted Cruz.
     As I watched the Senator from Texas and presidential hopeful speak twice in twenty seconds of his hope that "every word of Obamacare be repealed," I thought, "Every word, Ted?  Including the word, care?"
     Amazingly not out of breath, he finished, and I pleaded out loud at the TV set: "Please Jesus, come back to Earth and exorcise the demon from this man!"

                                                                            Vic Neptune