Ted Cruz again showed that his campaign is weirder than previous conservative Republican efforts by publicly fantasizing about spanking former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.Cruz revealed his spanking fantasy while rehashing the favored conservative conspiracy theory about Clinton doing something nefarious with her emails. In this iteration, Cruz echoed earlier conservative claims that Clinton was involved in a wide-ranging cover-up of the Benghazi terrorist attack in Libya.In response, Cruz said, Clinton deserved  spanking  for supposedly covering up what happened on the fateful night of the attack.A woman in the audience had asked:  For three and a half years people in Washington have been skirting around Benghazi and no one has been held accountable. I want to know what you would do. Someone needs to pay. Ma am you are exactly right. What happened in Benghazi is a national disgrace. Four Americans were murdered. We lost the first ambassador in the line of duty since the Carter administration,  Cruz said.  The immediate response of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the entire administration was to engage in deception, obstruction and cover up. They began by falsely blaming it on some ridiculous internet video, but even before that was the question that everyone should ask is why was security not there in the first place when the ambassador said over and over again, keep us safe. Cruz  added:  We do know Hillary told her daughter Chelsea, well gosh, I knew it was a terrorist attack, while we were out telling the American people it wasn t. You know I ll tell you, in my house, if my daughter Catherine, the five-year-old, says something she knows to be false, she gets a spanking. In addition to lying about the Obama administration response to the attack   President Obama referred to it as an  act of terror  almost immediately after the event   Cruz s conspiracy echoes other sexist belittling of Clinton that has become mainstream on the right.She has often been compared to Lady Macbeth and other infamous women who have orchestrated events as conservatives have often been flummoxed in their quest to attack her and tie her in to one conspiracy or another.Cruz is doing well in Iowa, and could consolidate enough of the fundamentalist right-wing  Christian  vote their to achieve a victory, but his har right persona is almost guaranteed to face electoral failure everywhere outside the solid red enclaves of the south. Indulging in a public fantasy about spanking Clinton will not help that cause.Featured image via Flickr