Winners & Losers: Dodging ICE & Getting Tucker-Punched

Ted Cruz was itching for the U.S. to bomb Iran even though he didn't know basic facts about the country. Well, he got his wish.

Welcome back to Winners & Losers, your weekly guide to the characters in this absurdist comic book universe that we call America. As I say almost every week, the situation we are facing is dramatically bad, but we are here because of people. People are doing this. The grifters do it for money. The fascists do it for power. The White Christian Nationalists do it because they’re a bunch of assholes. (That’s an oversimplification. It’s nonetheless true.)

If these characters go unnamed, they will continue to grift and power grab and be assholes until you and I have nothing left, not even hope. These people are the Losers.

Fortunately, there are also Winners (although not nearly enough … yet). In the face of fascism — real fascism — sometimes all it takes to become a winner is to say no.

Last week, Maya May spoke with Mark Bray on a Substack Live. He’s the author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. If you missed it, you should go back and watch. One thing that struck me from that chat was what Mark said about resisting authoritarianism. I’m paraphrasing, but it went something like this:

We must write letters to avoid fighting with our fists. And we must fight with our fists to avoid fighting with guns. And we must use guns to avoid using tanks.

While we are still standing solidly in the letter-writing phase of this calamity, the fact is, we can see the tanks from here. The Losers I write about in this weekly column have to recognize that we see them, and that we will not go gently. We must make them recognize this.

Our Winner this week is a group that said no, and our Loser is the most hated man in every room he enters.

Ted Cruz | Loser

Ted Cruz is one of those guys I generally avoid putting on this list because, you know, it’s kind of a gimme. Al Franken once said, I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.

But this week his loser performance was really transcendent, especially given what’s at stake.

By now, we’ve all seen it — his interview with Tucker Carlson**, of all people, in which Tucker took him to task for not knowing all that much about Iran. This was taped before Trump bombed Iran on Saturday. You can watch below if you can’t get enough.

You know it’s bad when Tucker Carlson is dunking on you. And then, of course, everyone dunked on him once the clip made it into the wild. Again, this kind of blunder wouldn’t usually rise to the level of Weekly Loser, but his failure is emblematic of a broader, more catastrophic failure on our horizon.