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" The late William F. Buckley penned defenses of Joe McCarthy that, whatever you may have thought of them, were elegant because he was intelligent and he wrote well. The heirs to his magazine write defenses of Senator Ted Cruz that are not because they are not and because they write with aerosol cans. Lamenting that Hagel&amp;#039;s unwillingness to offer a similar level of cooperation left the Senate in the dark about the sources of Hagel&amp;#039;s compensation, Cruz offered a stylized hypothetical. &amp;quot;He could not even say that the $200,000 he received [for speeches and appearances] did not come directly from a foreign government,&amp;quot; Cruz said. &amp;quot;It is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.&amp;quot; Cruz&amp;#039;s critics paint this as part of the &amp;quot;inference and innuendo,&amp;quot; the &amp;quot;guilt by association&amp;quot; that are the hallmarks of their reductive conception of McCarthyism. But of course it is no such thing. It is ridiculous to think that Cruz was implying any connection between Hagel and the Democratic People&amp;#039;s Republic of Korea - or much of anything at all. Cruz&amp;#039;s lament is about what we don&amp;#039;t know as a result of Hagel&amp;#039;s intransigence - namely, whether he&amp;#039;s been by paid by forces antithetic to American interests - not about what we do know. Cruz might have just as representatively said, &amp;quot;It is at a minimum relevant to know if that $200,000 deposited in his bank account came directly from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants or the Romulan Star Empire.&amp;quot; And McCarthy&amp;#039;s lament in Wheeling back in 1950 was about what we didn&amp;#039;t know as a result of State Department&amp;#039;s intransigence. On the other hand, Forces Antithetic would be a groovy name for a comeback album by Styx. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a17557/national-review-article-ted-cruz-022013/>