Snivelers like Sen. Ted Cruz make even Texas look weak and whiny 

I decided to quit Twitter more than a year ago. As I wrote back then, it was a hackneyed departure. During the process of disconnecting my old account, I somehow created a new one. (I sorta recall getting a "Thank You" card from Jack Dorsey for being among Twitter's earliest users in 2006 or so. Ahh, the fond days of being limited to 140 characters.)

I don't know the password to the new one, so I can't delete it. Therefore, I'm technically still a Twitter user. I don't post tweets. I do, however, comment sometimes that people are idiots, which is the most common use for Twitter, a notion amplified by our former president.

Prior to taking his insecurities and anger to his own Truth Social platform, where he continues to rant and rave about how unfair the entire world is to him, Donald Trump defined how best to profit by acting like a child.

Now, everyone is in on the grift. Not all grifters are born equal, however. I am not shy about giving Trump all the credit due him for being such a masterful grifter. After all, it's the rare flimflam man who remains adored by the persons from whom he fleeces money.

Others, like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, are such false front phonies—no matter what he posts—he manages to mangle his point or be blind to a nuance or hypocrisy within it. He thus suffers scorn—if such an insufferable soul can actually be said to suffer—from Twitter users on many of the world's continents, who mock him at every turn.

While Cruz is all things mockable—from his looks to his voice to his paunch to his dubious, faux sense of self—he's not an idiot. A pandering, whining cynic, sure, but he's not a dummy. He's highly educated.

Heck, if he were a dummy, he would have chosen another state to misrepresent in the U.S. Senate. As it is, Texas suits him just fine, because today's Texan is not even a shadow of what I grew up imagining a rough and tough Texan should be.

I know this because, thanks to my Mormon-side heritage that is so prone to document all things ancestral, I learned that I had relatives who were associates of either the Crockett or Bowie families. At least I think so, anyway—you know how stories get embellished around the campfire these days. Any of my Mormon grannies could have made Texas chili out of Ted Cruz.

James Bowie, famous for lending his name to the massive knife that bears his name, plus Davy Crockett ("The King of the Wild Frontier") as well as firebrand William B. Travis died at the Battle of the Alamo in San Antonio.

Texas was not even a U.S. territory at the time, and San Antonio was a frontier post in the Mexican state of Tejas. To this day, multi-generational residents in the area are wont to point out that if there had only been a wall constructed along the rim of the old state of Tejas, the gringos may never have arrived and thus, the world would have been spared the unflattering usurping of delicious Mexican cuisine into what we today know as Taco Time and Taco Bell.

As tragic as that is, more tragic is that no matter if it were myth or fiction, the fabled ideals those men left behind of the cow poking, tall in the saddle, tough-as-nails Texas lawmen—and even the tough oilmen of the past century—has now been obliterated by the likes of angry bird Ted Cruz. Sorry, Texas, but when I think of Texas tough, Ted Cruz forever bending like a willow in soft spring breeze doesn't do the trick.

Cruz has made it official: Texas is no longer thought of as the home of the Astros, Rangers, Cowboys, Spurs, Mavericks or Rockets. Instead, Texas is just a big lie these days. They can't seem to do a damned thing well, nor do a damned thing for themselves.

If there's trouble in Texas, Cruz flies away. So much for the Marlboro Man myth of the Texan who could take on anything, even lung cancer.

Thanks to Cruz—and seemingly every other Texas office holder, especially including their maladjusted governor—the state that for decades motivated and inspired an entire country is reduced to being viewed as the state of the Whiny Fusspot Snivelers.

It's a real shame. It didn't have to be that way—I blame Twitter. If not for Twitter and our adolescent addiction to it, I submit that it's entirely possible that our country would not have been dragged into being witness to the unholy marriage of ignorance and arrogance, that place where we all currently live.

It used to be that Americans took pride in our collective education, our work ethic and our shared values. But not anymore. A subject that formerly took an effort to grasp or understand—be it Hunter Biden's laptop or Trump's personal claims to pilfered papers—are equally reduced to snide comments, too often aimed at individuals and not the problem itself.

Twitter has exposed us to be people barely worthy of the word "citizen." I miss the good old days, when the bad guy and the good guy exited the swinging saloon doors and had it out face to face.

Or they talked over a cold sarsaparilla or a warm beer. But there's no talking now, just sniveling.

From my hitching post, the man wearing the tallest sniveling hat is Ted Cruz. He's got plenty of highfalutin company and, yes, I'm guilty as charged. One thing, though, he's not the best groveler. Not even close.

That crown sits on the head of our one and only Sen. Mike Lee.

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