It’s not uncommon for politicians to take an interest in pop culture, but it’s best when they do so in a coherent way. Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, is amazingly bad at it.
For example, a decade ago, just six months into the Texas Republican’s congressional career, Cruz tried to condemn the Affordable Care Act by reading “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor. “The difference with green eggs and ham — when Americans tried it, they discovered they did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare, either,” he declared. “They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”
There was, however, a small problem with the effort: Cruz apparently didn’t read all the way to the end of the story, since Dr. Seuss’ main character discovered that green eggs and ham really weren’t so bad after all. Indeed, the protagonist came to regret criticizing something he didn’t fully understand, and ended up celebrating the very thing he’d complained about so bitterly. Cruz had it all backwards.
Two years ago, the Texan tried again, launching a surprisingly aggressive offensive against Big Bird because the Muppet used social media to help inform kids about important public health information. Cruz insisted that the Sesame Street character was guilty of promoting “government propaganda.”
The senator’s criticisms were weird and misguided, but as we discussed at the time, he didn’t seem to care. And the more Cruz faced pushback, the more he kept the offensive going: A Washington Post report noted at the time that the Republican senator “tweeted or retweeted Big Bird attacks” far more than he commented on a mass-casualty event in Houston that happened around the same time.
The good news is, Cruz has moved on from Dr. Seuss and Big Bird. The bad news, the GOP lawmaker is now worked up about Barbie. As The New Republic summarized last week:
A growing number of voices on the right are accusing the upcoming Barbie movie of pushing Chinese propaganda. The film, which comes out July 21, stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling as Barbie and Ken, who leave Barbie Land to explore the real world. In one scene before they leave, a rough, hand-drawn map of the world can be seen in the background. The map includes the so-called nine-dash line, a much-disputed division of territory in the South China Sea.
The accusation is incredibly foolish. As Dan Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts University, explained last week, the cartoonish image from the film is “a nonsense map. There are squiggles and arrows and hashtags and dotted lines all over the damn place. To the extent that the map is supposed to depict the Pacific Rim, the dotted line is nowhere close to where the actual nine-dash line is.”
In other words, the map is not a secret message, intended to warp audiences’ minds.
And yet, there was Cruz, taking an exceedingly weird interest in the movie. In fact, a spokesperson for the senator told the Daily Mail last week, “China wants to control what Americans see, hear, and ultimately think, and they leverage their massive film markets to coerce American companies into pushing [Chinese Communist Party] propaganda — just like the way the Barbie film seems to have done with the map.” Soon after, Cruz kept at it, suggesting that “Barbie” is somehow responsible for promoting Chinese propaganda. If the GOP senator wants to take an occasional interest in the culture outside of politics, fine. But it’d far better for Cruz if his cultural commentary wasn’t quite so absurd. Big Bird isn’t his enemy; Dr. Seuss can’t be used to undermine support for the ACA; and the idea that “Barbie” includes secret political messages from Beijing is incredibly foolish, even by the low standards of Republican politics in 2023. Maybe Cruz could pick up a new hobby? Maybe something to do with governing and trying to pass worthwhile legislation?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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