DID GQ TAKE THE GOP'S ANTI-TED CRUZ OPPOSITION RESEARCH AND TURN IT INTO ... A PRO-CRUZ PUFF PIECE?

I got pushback from some of you after posting "Ted Cruz Will Be Just Fine" yesterday -- but I apparently have company: today GQ posts a long Jason Zengerle profile of Cruz, which, despite its title ("Ted Cruz: The Distinguished Wacko Bird from Texas"), is really a puff piece about how good Cruz is at navigating the current insane political landscape:

... Is this any way to get ahead in Washington? Well, Cruz is no dummy -- just ask him -- and his swift rise might prove that it's the only way....

Already his fans are nudging him to think about a presidential run in 2016, and he's nudging right back, making trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina....

Cruz is a dazzling orator, speaking not merely in precise sentences but complete paragraphs -- no teleprompter, sometimes not even a podium....

About that family story: American voters have a hard time resisting politicians with a good one. Ted Cruz's is great, and he's even better at telling it....

"We're in a moment when the combination of being hard-core and intelligent is really at a premium," says National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who's been friends with Cruz since they went to Princeton together. "Because the two things that conservatives are tired of are politicians who sell out and politicians who embarrass them by not being able to make an account of themselves." In this arithmetic, Mitt Romney is the sellout and Sarah Palin is the embarrassment -- and Cruz is the great new hope who brings the virtues of both without the liabilities of either....

Should he run for president, in 2016 or beyond, Cruz's strategy will be to superglue himself to the conservative base and hope it carries him to the GOP nomination. It's been tried over and over since Reagan -- and it has failed every time. Just not enough wacko birds out there. Then again, the men who have tried it -- from Pat Robertson in 1988 to Rick Santorum in 2012 -- possessed nowhere near Cruz's political acumen, not to mention his life story....

Yeah, I've cherry-picked the positive stuff. But the ultimate conclusion here is that Ted Cruz may be breaking all the rules and pissing all kinds of people off, but he's succeeding -- and this is all said with a sort of bemused awe. No surprise, really -- the Beltway is a place where "strong and wrong" is preferred to "weak and right," as Bill Clinton has put it -- or perhaps the appropriate quote is "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." (That's from Osama bin Laden.)

And all this despite the fact that the piece is full of embarrassing information about Cruz: that he alienated colleagues on George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign with endless self-serving e-mails, for instance, or that he was a snob at Harvard Law who "refused to study with anyone who hadn't been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale ("He said he didn't want anybody from 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown," says one of his law school roommates). These bits of information may have come from some of the same Republicans who, according to Chris Wallace of Fox News, are trying to sandbag Cruz:

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said Sunday morning that he'd received opposition research from other Republicans about Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) in advance of Cruz's appearance this morning, a serious indication of how upset the GOP is with the Senator leading the risky charge to defund ObamaCare.

"This has been one of the strangest weeks I've ever had in Washington," Wallace said. "As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats but from top Republicans, to hammer Cruz."

At GQ, it looks as if Jason Zengerle got the same packet of material -- and wrote it up into a story about how dauntingly talented Ted Cruz is, however off-putting and egomaniacal he may be.

So, yeah, at least for now, Cruz is winning.