His addressing this the way he did is what separates the men from the boys, the men from the good ol boys, and the men from the effeminate limp wristed GOPe and their intimidators across the aisle.
The reason I do not see it the way you do is that while I have the utmost respect for Ted Cruz, I also have the utmost respect (in the form of contempt) for the erosive and attack-based approach of those (and those in the media) who would like to destroy him. As intelligent as he is, he is *not* as skilled as they are in media manipulation. He just hasn’t been in it as long as they have.
When we see the Republicans question Sebelius with ZERO collective preparation in the form of a “talking points” question list, failing to concentrate on questions that, taken together, could possibly form a narrative, a storyline...we see what happens. They appear as harpies just trying to harrow their opponent, with little effect. And we know that this is how the media will attempt to portray them They had the opportunity to make a case, but whether because of individual grandstanding or just a total lack of strategy, they diffused their efforts. This is what we saw today. Poor strategy. I would have liked to see the so-called Republican “war on women” take the form of reducing Cruella to tears after that hearing. I would pay to see that.
Back to Cruz’ comments. There is not a single soul in the entire universe whose opinion of the Trayvon/Zimmerman affair is not set in stone settled. It is done. Thus there is nothing to be gained by him commenting. Ahhh, but there is something to lose, because now he can and will be portrayed as a pro-gun, anti-grieving-woman racist Republican. And those portrayals play directly into the standard liberal prejudices re: Trayvon/Zim that I just mentioned. It is an entanglement, a diversion. To the extent he has to explain his position a dozen more times, and he will gambitted into doing exactly that, it’s just a waste of effort.
But this is not the case wrt 0care. There are plenty of changeable minds on this topic and Cruz is a jewel of a representative of the anti-0care effort. Given that we have only one Cruz, only one Mike Lee, perhaps a total of 10 or 20 or 30 articulate anti-0care representatives in Congress, I don’t want these star players diverted into trivia. Trayvon Martin is trivia. To me, the wiser man stays out of this stupid little mudpit.
It is not enough to be able to see what is “next”. It is necessary to be able to see what is next-next and next-next-next. Personally, I am very bad at it.