Ted "Dirty Tricks" Cruz fires senior staff member

The truth of Ted Cruz's dirty tricks mentality is beginning to seep through the cracks in his fake piety facade.   Whether its Chris Christie and Bridgegate or Richard Nixon and Watergate, what one's staff does usually reflects what they know the boss wants them to do -- whether he explicitly knows the details or not.

I don't doubt for a minute that all the dirty tricks attributed to the Cruz campaign had his tacit approval.   But now the latest one backfired, and Cruz has made his senior communications director, Rick Tyler, fall on his sword and take the blame -- and resign.

Tyler apologized to Marco Rubio for putting out a false rumor that Rubio had mocked a Cruz staff member he saw reading the Bible.   Tyler says that the audio he based the claim on was indistinct and therefore he shouldn't have put the story out, since he couldn't back up his charge of what Rubio actually said.

Rachel Maddow, for one, spoke up for Rick Tyler, describing him as a nice guy.   He doesn't sound like a dirty-tricks kind of guy -- except in doing the job his boss wants.   Definitely, others in the business do not talk about him the way they talked about Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

Here's the Rubio campaign's response, which puts it square on Cruz himself:

"Rick (Tyler) is a really good spokesman who had the unenviable task of working for a candidate willing to do or say anything to get elected.   There is a culture in the Cruz campaign, from top to bottom, that no lie is too big and no trick too dirty.   Rick did the right thing by apologizing to Marco.  It's high time for Ted Cruz to do the right thing and stop the lies."

One thing can be said about Donald Trump.   He does his own mud slinging rather than blaming in on the hired help.

Ralph

PS:  On another front, Cruz has now flip-flopped from what he said just a month ago about deporting illegal aliens.   Then he rejected the notion of mass deportation and "jackboots" like in a police state.  "That's not how we enforce the law for any crime."

Now that he's falling behind, he told Bill O'Reilly on Fox News last night that he would definitely deport all 12 million undocumented people and wouldn't allow them to return.  O'Reilly asked if this would include those who simply overstay their visas.  Cruz replied:  "You better believe it.  Both Donald Trump and Marco Rubio would allow those 12 million people to become citizens.   I will not."  That's the most extreme position any one of the candidates has taken.   This has been a bad day for Cruz's campaign;  he must really be worried.