New guy likely to provide lots of comment grist

Bloggers all over the country should be rejoicing at the arrival of Ted Cruz to the U.S. Senate.

On the job just a few weeks and he’s already managed to:

* Wonder aloud whether the next defense secretary has been accepting speaking fees from radical groups.

* Question whether said defense boss-designate and the secretary of state – two decorated Vietnam War combat veterans – were “ardent” enough in their support of the military.

* Draw a rebuke from a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, himself a former Vietnam prisoner of war and a one-time Republican nominee for president of the United States, for “impugning” the integrity of the probable new defense secretary.

To be honest, although the grist mill may be clogged with material on which to comment as it spews from Ted Cruz’s mouth, it leaves me chagrined. Why? Cruz represents Texas, which I have called home for nearly 29 years.

I am going to hate listening to others ridicule my state merely because most Texas voters elected this guy to the Senate in November 2012. Late-night comics will have a field day. Liberal commentators will join them. And perhaps even some conservative pundits are going to grow weary over time of the kinds of statements Cruz utters. They’ll become incensed that the Senate’s Republican elders will allow him to pop off as he has done with such regularity in so little time.

Used to be that Senate newcomers were to be seen and seldom heard. In this new age, though, new guys get to be seen and heard at the same time.

It’s good for folks like me who need material with which to work.

But a part of me is holding out that Texas’s senior Republican senator, John Cornyn, takes the new fellow aside and schools him on matters of decorum, which I believe still counts for something in the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body.