‘The Daily Show’ Tells the Story of Ted Cruz, ‘The Booger on the Lip of Democracy’
The Daily Show has released the second installment in its new profile series, “The Daily Showography,” this time examining the life and times of Ted Cruz, not-so-endearingly referred to as “The Booger on the Lip of Democracy.” (That sub-title is a nod to a nod to a 2016 Republican presidential debate, during which a small object — ostensibly a booger — dangled from Cruz’s lip as he spoke. And then he swallowed it, on national television, for all to see.)
The clip traces Cruz’ rise from a Texas teen obsessed with boobs and world domination to an irritating Princeton student to a new husband whose first act after returning from his honeymoon was to buy 100 cans of Campbell’s Chunky Soup. After all that, he became a high-powered attorney, arguing in front of the Supreme Court for the right to execute mentally ill prisoners and to ban the sale of sex toys.
“That’s right,” the segment’s narrator quips, “in a show of selfless devotion to the law, Ted Cruz defended a ban on sex toys, even though he himself is a complete dildo.”
The segment goes on to discuss Cruz’s 2012 Senate run and his rise during the Tea Party era, while it also pays tribute to his rather unfortunate penchant for doing bad impressions of everyone from Yoda to Ned Flanders. And then, of course, it revisits Cruz’s failed 2016 presidential bid, where Donald Trump brushed him aside by calling him a liar and his wife ugly while implying that his father had a role in the John F. Kennedy assassination. After briefly standing up for himself at that year’s Republican National Convention, Cruz was soon phone-banking for Trump.
The segment ended with a parade of voices from across the political spectrum noting how unlikable Cruz is. It also showed Cruz’ uneven attempts to rehabilitate his image, helping to stoke the January 6th insurrection and then taking an ill-advised trip to Cancun while his home state, Texas, was facing a historic winter storm. “But these are just small bumps on the road to his ultimate goal: world domination,” the narrator says. “To Ted Cruz, the Earth is a mere booger dancing on his lips, tantalizing, mesmerizing, repulsive, waiting until the day when he can swallow us whole and hope that no one saw it.”
