The Rude Pundit receives all kinds of campaign email he never signed up for because, for whatever reason, he has been put on Hell's political spam list. Most of it is just Hillary Clinton saying, "I want you" or Rand Paul pathetically whining that he can still win if anyone would pay attention to him (Spoiler: he can't and they won't). So it's rare when something breaks through the white noise of begging and masturbation. But he got one today that made him take notice.
It's from the Ted Cruz campaign (motto: "To know Ted is to hate Ted"), and it's titled, "A Time for Prayer." See, the Rude Pundit totally forgot that he signed up to be part of Senator Ted Cruz's Super-Duper Prayer Team, and we've been receiving missives in the email telling us how to pray for Cruz to become president and smite his enemies with one jerk of the mighty cock of Christ.
Cruz's campaign takes verses from the Bible and edits them to make them Cruz-centric. It's sort of like how you go to your girlfriend's house and paste your face over the face of ex-boyfriends, her father, her brother, and her dog in her photos so that you are her everything. It's creepy and fucked-up and says more about you than you might want people to know. And the version of the Bible that Cruz uses is The Message, in which the language is dumbed down so that even your double-inbred cousin can drool over the pages and understand it.
This week's Super-Duper Prayer Team prayerlingus comes from Psalm 35, which is Old Testament David praying for some help from the Big Guy. Just to give you a flavor of the language we're talking here, this is Verse 1 in King James: "Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me." And here it is in The Message: "Harass these hecklers, God,/punch these bullies in the nose. The former is poetry. The latter is dogshit. Perfect for Cruzite reading.
So here's Cruz's version of verses 9-10: "But let [Ted and staff] run loose and free, celebrating God’s great work, every bone in [their] bod[ies] laughing, singing, 'God, there’s no one like you. You put the down-and-out on their feet and protect the unprotected from bullies!'" We're supposed to pray that God prevents Cruz from getting a well-deserved wedgie? A shit swirlie from the forces of Lucifer? Someone saying his outfit is "totally gay" on Instagram?
But it gets better (worse). Verse 4: "When those [out to trap Ted] try to knife [him] in the back, make [him] look foolish. Frustrate all those who are plotting [his] downfall." Swear to god, those bracketed parts are from the Cruz campaign, and they're replacing "me" (or David, who wanted help dealing with persecution by Saul and...you know, who the fuck cares) with Cruz. That's right. Cruz is now David before he became king. And the translation really is like it's written by psychopaths for psychopaths.
And then, using verse 19, we pray, "[We the Prayer Team, Ted and Heidi, and the entire campaign staff] will give you full credit when everyone gathers for worship; when the people turn out in force [we] will say [our] Hallelujahs." So the logic here is that voting for Ted Cruz is like worshipping God. That's not megalomaniacal in a truly frightening way at all. What's great is that Cruz's campaign thought its voters were too fucking stupid to get that these quotes could be metaphors for Cruz. Instead, they chose to literalize it.
The amount of nutzoid religiosity that has become part of the Cruz campaign approaches the absurd. Someone's gonna have to tell the Rude Pundit what Cruz even meant when he said, as part of his closing argument in Iowa, it's time to "awaken the body of Christ that we may pull back from the abyss." Where the fuck is the body of Christ? Didn't he ascend to heaven? Is it in heaven? Has Jesus been asleep all this time? And then he went on, "If we awaken and energize the body of Christ — if Christians and people of faith come out and vote our values — we will win and we will turn the country around," which clarifies things perhaps: So the "body" here is a group of people and not the actual body of Christ. That's pretty fucking confusing. Anything else? "I want to tell everyone to get ready, strap on the full armor of God, get ready for the attacks that are coming," Cruz said. Honestly, the Rude Pundit stopped at "strap on" and couldn't read any further for fear that the rest was a graphic description of Cruz getting anally violated for votes, which is how we got the Iowa caucuses.
By the way, the email is topped with a photo of Cruz and his family, including the daughter who hates his fucking guts. We all feel you, girlfriend, we all feel you.
