The definitive debunking: Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac Killer

The Internet likes to make jokes. For all of the countless millions of dollars invested by the government, businesses and individuals the world over, one of the main things for which a decent percentage of people use the World Wide Web is to make fun of other people. We've untapped the power of an interconnected world, and this is what we've attained.

People in positions of prominence and authority are more likely to become the target of such jokes, and so it is that Ted Cruz, junior senator from Texas and junior candidate for the Republican nomination for the presidency, has become the target of a particularly esoteric one. But it is just a joke, and so we will dispatch with it curtly:

No, Ted Cruz is not the Zodiac killer.

Conservative organ The National Review published a scathing attack on poor white communities, part of its general disgust at Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's support base. If you ever wanted to understand the enraged contempt in which conservatives hold the poor — especially now many of them are voting for Trump instead of them — here's a fabulous primer!

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t… If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

From Wiki: Paul Ryan (September 23, 1949 – March 6, 2016 in Massachusetts) was an American comic book and comic strip cartoonist. Ryan worked extensively for Marvel Comics and DC Comics on a number of super-hero comics. Until his death in 2016, he penciled and inked the daily comic strip The Phantom for King Features Syndicate.