Senator Ted Cruz is acting more like Barack Obama than like someone fit to be President:

To lay my cards on the table, my father is Jewish and I think I am about as pro-Israel as one gets. Yet Senator Cruz appeared to me to behave boorishly — totally out of tone, with apparently no understanding of the actual conditions under which half the people in front of him live on a daily basis, and squandering a great opportunity to make the American view point more understandable for a room full of religious leaders in the Middle East who don’t “get” us any more than we “get” them.

(source: What I Saw at the “In Defense of Christians” Summit | CatholicVote.org)

I’ve read multiple sources looking for anything more charitable than “d’oh!” to say about this, and CatholicVote.org was “nicest” so far (and that’s not even close to exculpatory).  Mark Movsesian’s account goes a bit farther:

My first thought was that Cruz had been exceptionally inept. How could he fail to anticipate that he would derail the conference by taking this line? It seems, however, that he had the episode planned. Before giving the speech, Cruz met with the editorial board of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, which then ran an obligingly alarmist account of the upcoming event with the headline “Cruz Headlines Conference Featuring Hezbollah Supporters.” Apparently, the whole thing was a setup, a farce to make Cruz look good with his base and shore up his credibility as a pro-Israel hawk. Mollie Hemingway has the evidence over at The Federalist.

(source: A Sad Episode | Mark Movsesian | First Things)

 From that last-named source–and I take serious exception to her slander of William F. Buckley, Jr., along the way–a telling summary: 

When Cruz was supposed to give the keynote address and discuss the deadly serious topic of persecution of Christians, he instead insulted a largely immigrant and foreign crowd as a group that didn’t understand their own political situation and stomped out of the room after calling them a bunch of haters. You can get the details and transcript here.

(source: Ted Cruz Is No Hero For Insulting A Room Of Persecuted Christians)

If we want to build consensus, we’ll definitely have to start by agreeing that organized killing, dispossession, and forced relocation are bigger problems than who can pose with the most chutzpah for the election-year press.

After all, we wouldn’t want a President with no qualifications except the galling emptiness of his celebrity, would we?