Texas Senator Ted Cruz spent Friday evening railing at a news anchor for describing him with an unflattering epithet because of his reverence for a Russian army recruitment ad.
Mr Cruz last week expressed his combined anger, embarrassment and concern that whereas Russia is recruiting troops with hypermasculine videos focused on muscles, uniforms and guns, the US – whose defence budget is more than 12 times the size of Russia’s – is putting out pastel-coloured ads telling stories of diverse paths towards military service, with messages that focus not on violence and physical toughness but on values.
After his original tweet positing that “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea”, Mr Cruz was pilloried for propagating the very message the Russian military is trying to project – and knocked by Senate colleague and Purple Heart veteran Tammy Duckworth, who suggested “Perhaps a US Senator shouldn’t suggest that the *Russian* military is better than the American military that protected him from an insurrection he helped foment?”
It was in this midst of this pile-on that MSNBC anchor Brian Williams laid into Mr Cruz for his “remarkably stupid lapse of judgment”, calling him “Kremlin Cruz” for crediting the Russian army with the masculine edge it wants to display.
Come the end of the week, Mr Cruz was enraged.
“Is there a more pitiful example of corrupt corporate media than Brian Williams?” he fumed in a tweet on Friday evening.
It went on, with the senator ranting that Mr Williams and other critics had twisted the meaning of his original tweet. “Now, he’s throwing a hissy fit that I criticised the ridiculously woke video that the Biden admin put out,” wrote Mr Cruz. “Williams accidentally told the truth, when he describes it as ‘a video meant to diminish the U.S. military.’ TRUE. That’s the problem. (The Pentagon put it out.)”
The video Mr Cruz put out was in fact a compilation of both the Russian and US military ads. It omitted the segment of the American clip that revealed its narrator to be a serving female corporal.
After several tweets touting his opposition to communism, claiming that “Brian and his lefty comrades” are “working relentlessly to diminish the effectiveness of the US military”, and complaining that Joe Biden has relaxed US sanctions targeting the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, he took a final shot at his target.
“Congrats, Brian. You are Pravda.”
Besides Mr Cruz, others on the hardline right have lately taken aim at “feminising” moves within the “woke” US military. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson drew the ire of Pentagon chiefs with a segment fulminating against plans to provide uniforms that better fit pregnant servicewomen. ““So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits,” he ranted. “Pregnant women are gonna fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the US military.”
He also complained more recently that the US is failing to properly investigate reports of unidentified aerial phenomena because it is busy with diversity initiatives. In fact, a report on the strange things seen by navy pilots has been years in the making, and will be delivered to Congress in the coming weeks.