Stephen Colbert Knows Why Ted Cruz Picked Carly Fiorina as His Running Mate
There are myriad reasons that Ted Cruz picking Carly Fiorina as his running mate is absurd, but Stephen Colbert focused on the most essential one last night: Ted Cruz is nowhere close to winning the Republican nomination, so Ted Cruz is nowhere close to needing a running mate. "I'm still reeling from yesterday's big news out of the Cruz campaign," Colbert said. "First, that there is still a Cruz campaign." Later, he compared Cruz's move to picking a vice captain on the Titanic-a nice riff on the rearranging-the-deck-chairs cliché.
Colbert certainly wasn't out of line. Cruz is 400 delegates behind the apricot demagogue who leads the Republican race, and he now needs to get more delegates than there are delegates available to win the nomination on the first ballot in Cleveland. The Republican primary circus has turned into a house party that won't end-you know, when the guy who wasn't invited but found out about it somehow and the guy who ate all your snacks are the only ones left and they just won't leave.
After knocking Cruz's jaw-droppingly sanctimonious speaking style-where he pauses for six seconds between phrases like he's hosting a reality show-Colbert got to work lampooning Fiorina. "As the former head of Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina is the perfect choice to balance the ticket and save some money on toner," he said, adding she was "clearly honored to accept this important job that will never exist." And then there was the singing, and Colbert's spot-on reaction:
He wasn't the only one scarred by it:
Of course, the timing and the singing aren't the only absurdities of the Cruz-Fiorina partnership. There's the fact that her records in business (laying off 30,000 workers and getting pushed out of HP) and in politics (losing a California senate race by 1 million votes) are bad. There's the fact that she said a few months ago that Cruz was power-mad and principle-free:
But as bizarre a pick as Fiorina was, the veep process doesn't help. Colbert had some thoughts on that, too:
