Fright night

The second-best question I got all week was whether Sean Penn is a journalist.

Actually the answer was easy.

In a nation with a Constitution granting a free press, anybody who sets out to learn something for the benefit of the public and then imparts what he has learned through some form of media is, in fact, a journalist.

A constitutional right is not something that may be licensed or regulated by professional standards, thank goodness. Journalism is not a profession. It's a free activity.

Whether Penn is a relevant or competent journalist, and whether his article in Rolling Stone about the Mexican drug lord served any valuable purpose, and whether his explanation for that article and himself on 60 Minutes a week ago made any sense--those are questions to be contemplated, if at all, on a day when I'm not otherwise engaged by the best question of the week.

Actually, though, I can dispense with those questions now: No, no and no.


So let's get to that best question, which went as follows: "Who scares you more, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?"

It's an excellent question. It makes you think.

It forces you to break down the oppressive dread that consumes you over the prospect of either man becoming president, and thus for the future of the country. It forces you to assess and allocate the appropriate parts of that dread to:

An egomaniacal blowhard who'll say anything for a self-satisfying percentage point in a poll.

An ideological zealot who is widely disliked and once insisted on filibustering to shut down the government over Obamacare when everyone in his party implored him to accept that a shutdown would accomplish nothing other than to blow up in Republicans' faces.

So Cruz filibustered. So the government got shut down. So it blew up in Republicans' faces. So we still have Obamacare.

Perhaps I'm telegraphing my leaning.

Yes, the ideological zealot hardly anyone likes--Cruz--is more frightening than a guy--Trump--who seems to be a megalomaniac running on a lark and who might, if somehow disastrously elected, apply whatever delegation and management skills he's developed over the years to get the country run with some measure of pragmatism and moderation.

Minnesota survived the governorship of that wrestler, Jesse Ventura. Same thing with the nation and Trump, except for nuclear weapons.

Trump probably would be satisfied simply being on TV a lot and as long as his approval rating stayed high enough to keep the monstrous ego fed. Lord help us if the rating dropped and President Trump reverted to campaign-grade pandering.

Several weeks ago I was interviewing Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin when it ran through my head to ask him if he, as a recent member of Congress at a time when Cruz was in the Senate, could confirm reports that few if any of Cruz's Republican colleagues could stand him.

I figured Griffin would deflect the question, since Cruz is likely to win the Republican presidential primary in Arkansas. But he didn't.

He said it was true people didn't like Cruz. He said Cruz acted like he was the world's only pure conservative.

Griffin said Cruz wouldn't work with people, and that a political leader, especially a president, sometimes must make concessions--such as, Griffin said, being interviewed by the likes of me.

Surely you know by now the story I'm about to retell. I've told it in this space too many times, largely because I absolutely love it.

In a Senate Republican caucus meeting when he was forcing a shutdown over Obamacare despite the pleading of his own party, Cruz said those objecting to his tactics weren't true conservatives and weren't being true to their promises to voters. Our senior Republican senator, John Boozman, who had previously spoken in Washington about as frequently as Clarence Thomas asks questions during Supreme Court oral arguments, exploded in anger over Cruz's brazen and absurd and insulting assertion.

Here's a handy rule of thumb: A man who can make even Boozman explode is not likely to offer the temperament and people skills we need in our commander-in-chief.

Former U.S. Sen. Bob Dole, now 92, is saying freely these days that Cruz's nomination would be "catastrophic" for the Republican Party. U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said much the same thing last week. U.S. Sen. John McCain is saying Cruz's citizenship is a legitimate question.

Republican senators are rushing to offer advice to Marco Rubio.

Some compare Cruz to Arkansas' own Tom Cotton. But that's unfair to Your Boy Tom.

Cotton knows how to work with colleagues. He got 47 signatures on his letter to Iran before he released it.

Cruz would have run to the front of the grandstand on his own lone signature.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/24/2016

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