So I think I know where Ted Cruz got this assertion about Robert Dear, the man charged with the Planned Parenthood shooting:

When a reporter reminded Cruz it has been reported Dear made a comment about "baby parts" while being apprehended, Cruz retorted, "It’s also been reported that he was registered as an independent and a woman and transgendered leftist activist, if that’s what he is. I don’t think it’s fair to blame on the rhetoric on the left. This is a murderer.”

It was reported not long after the shooter was ID'd that his voter registration form refers to him as "FEMALE" -- a fact a lot of right-wingers pounced on, even though it's probably an error on the part of whoever entered his name on the rolls, or perhaps the paranoid Dear's attempt to confound the authorities in some incomprehensible way. (One ex-neighbor has said that Dear urged him to get a metal roof so the government couldn't spy on him. Maybe Dear thought putting the wrong gender on his voter form would keep the feds' radio transmissions out of his dental fillings.)

But how did Cruz leap from that report to "transgender"?

I suspect Cruz reads a popular wingnut blogger named Soopermexican, who posted this yesterday:

Was The Colorado Shooting Actually ‘Transgender Terrorism’?

So this is really freakin’ weird. According to voting records that people are finding on the internet, the Colorado shooter Robert L. Dear, identifed as a woman....

Now this could be a mistake because this dude does not look like a transgender anything....

Then again maybe he/she is just really good at it. Who knows?

Soopermexican doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, but he can accurately boast that his posts over the years have been quoted and cited by Rush Limbaugh, Dana Perino, Michelle Malkin, and other mainstream members of the right-wing commentariat. Soopermexican, therefore, is practically an establishment figure -- and now we have a guy who's considered a credible political-professional alternative to Donald Trump in the GOP presidential race, and Soopermexican is apparently one of his sources for fast-breaking news.

There's no longer any line between the consumers of this swill and the politicians they're being gulled to vote for. We should have realized that after Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Donald Trump, and Ben Carson, but Ted Cruz is supposed to be an educated guy who knows what he's talking about, even if he comes to insane conclusions. Sorry, no: There's no effective difference between Cruz and the others I've listed. This is what the GOP is now, from top to bottom.

Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog