On April 24, 2015, I wrote Senator Ted Cruz. I was working a series about Rs running for POTUS. I’m pretty sure what I wrote about “this puerile personification of pestilence”—my words—left me so unclean I walked away from the exercise.

Alas, I’m back with redux, but not ready to leave this miserable momzer alone. Where to start, where to start? Let’s begin with health insurance.

Senator Cruz popped up on Thursday announcing that he is one of those “millions of Americans  who’s lost their healthcare because of ObamaCare.” (Details in Bradford Richardson’s piece for The Hill, Cruz says he lost his health insurance because of ObamaCare.) Well, Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo did a little sleuthing aka journalism, and he has the truth at What’s The Real Reason Ted Cruz Doesn’t Have Health Insurance? For non-clickers, the Cruz story about a 50% premium increase is total bullshit. Simply not true. He’s also had five or six months to deal with the situation. And, by the way, he can readily buy insurance through the DC exchange and get a subsidy because he’s a government employee. What a schtoonk!

Then there are the loans. When Ted Cruz ran for the Senate in 2012 his stump speech included, repeatedly, this line: “Sweetheart, I’d like us to liquidate our entire net worth, liquid net worth, and put it into the campaign.” Sweetheart is Heidi Cruz, Mrs. Cruz, a Harvard MBA and, until she took a leave of absence, an investment manager at Goldman Sachs.

Alas, nothing got liquidated. Instead, Mr. and Mrs. Cruz borrowed from Goldman Sachs against their portfolio, and also borrowed from Citibank. Noise aside, this was a bet that the stock market would go up, not down, while Barack Obama was living in the White House.

Okay, so the senator-to-be lied to his electorate. True dat, but he also lied to the Federal Election Commission. For sure, it may be the least effective agency in Washington, and it is a federal go’mint agency), but it’s hard to imagine this man—a Harvard Law grad, and a political animal for his whole life—did not know he needed to report the loans. No, I’m sorry; not “hard to believe.” Unfathomable aka a fucking lie!

Then there’s the whole matter of, can this man even be our president? Here are the facts. He was born in Canada, to an American citizen mom and a non-American citizen dad. He was a dual citizen—Canada and the United States of America—from December 20, 1970 through May 14, 2014, almost 43-1/2 years. (He’s only just 45 today!)

There are competing analyses regarding the issue. Bryan Garner wrote Memorandum: Is Ted Cruz Eligible for the Presidency? for The Atlantic on January 14. Professor Garner, a scholar and expert on legal writing—and the co-author of a legal writing book with Justice Antonin Scalia—says Senator Cruz qualifies to run. (Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, both former Solicitors General, and from opposite side, jointly reach the same conclusion in a Harvard Law Review article from last year, On the Meaning of “Natural Born Citizen.”) Alas, Mary Brigid McManamom, a professor at Widener University’s Delaware School of Law says otherwise, in Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president, written for the Washington Post on January 12.

The constitutional law question is complicated, without doubt. I’ve read the material on both sides, and I’m no expert, but I like the “he’s not eligible” side just a bit better than the other side. Close though, and if real judges decide the issue, their decision should stand.

The two Arizona senators who got the Republican nomination for president—Barry Goldwater and John McCain—both had issues, Goldwater because Arizona was a territory when he was born, and McCain because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone, property controlled by the USA. The Cruz situation is different. Foreign country, without doubt. Citizen of that country until his mid-40s. An honorable man would have walked away from Canada a long time ago, and he would have asked a court to resolve his eligibility, long before a campaign began.

Tomorrow’s post will focus more broadly on the sorry state of affairs new face as we move into the post-Obama era. I conclude this post by saying bad is bad is bad, but then there’s worse than bad, and worse than bad is spelled C-r-u-z.