I would not wish food poisoning on anyone, but there is something pitifully amusing about the image of Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz, sweatier and more gray-faced than usual, hugging the toilet after eating a bad oyster.
In fact, it evokes the Texas senator’s own rueful grin whenever he’s talking about the sick, sad state of our country, full of foolish people who are skeptical of carpet-bombing parts of the Middle East.
The Cruz-eats-bad-oyster scenario is brilliantly imagined early on in A Cruzmas Carol: Ted Cruz Takes a Dickens of a Constitutional, an erotica-filled parody of both A Christmas Carol and Cruz, the hardline social conservative and unctuous, frightfully intelligent ideologue who has taken the lead in Iowa in his bid to win the Republican nomination.
Written by Lacey Noonan, a pseudonymous and prolific author of erotic fiction, A Cruzmas Carol opens with the senator “scanning the room for pussy” at his retirement party at Fizzywhigs, an “exclusive D.C. establishment.” He settles on Roberta Cratchit, a “raven-haired, pale skinned beauty from Yale Law” and Cruz’s Chief of Staff, who begs him to stay in the public sector and slips him an aphrodisiacal oyster during a make-out session.
“I bet she has a wonderful vagina,” Cruz muses. “Just wonderful. Warm, inviting. American. Cherry. Like Martha Washington. Like a colonial bonnet for a dick.”
Noonan’s book is far from alone. Among the stacks of 2016 presidential erotica is Donald Feels the Bern by Cliff Fuxtable, which imagines a love affair between Trump and Sanders.
Other titles include Bernie’s Desire; The Light in Jeb’s Eyes; Donald: Billionaire in Sin; A Trumping in the Night: Making the Country, and Romance, Great Again; and the highly imaginative President Trump’s Gay Hairpiece and the Revenge of the Were-Water Buffalo.
Noonan’s Cruz wants out of politics. He’s grown weary of “partisan gridlock, the attention whores and the attention pimps and the attention johns, the pernicious and wasteful government that would never in a million years turn back the downhill slide inaugurated immediately after the Declaration of Independence in 1776.”
But Roberta, a “Buffalo Nickel of a dime” with “wide hips like a fertility goddess,” insists Cruz should run for president to save the country from depravity and Obamacare. Their hot and heavy exchange is cut short when gastronomical distress sends Cruz hurtling toward the men’s room.
Here, he runs into Karl Rove, who works as a bathroom attendant at Fizzywhigs (“It’s the only job I could find in D.C. after my Romney meltdown in 2012 on Fox”) and isn’t wearing pants because he “can’t afford ’em.”
He, too, urges Cruz to run for Oval Office while America is “still hard for his hole.”
He reminisces about how the two of them, both staffers during George W. Bush’s administration, helped Bush beat Al Gore for re-election in 2000: “Even though more people voted for [Gore], we used the gerrymandered-ass Erectoral College to our benefit.”
Cruz refuses, but he can’t help himself from looking down at Rove’s “little chief of staff” before vomiting violently in one of the bathroom stalls. A disgruntled Rove warns that he will soon meet three more “bathroom attendants.”
After the oyster-expelling episode, Cruz remembers that Roberta was going to meet him in the bathroom for a quickie and attempts to revive his little chief of staff, only to be interrupted by the “Bathroom Attendant of Constitutionality Past.”
The apparition comes to him in the form of a turkey—“the bird they took the feather from for the quill pen they used to sign the Declaration of Independence”—and together they journey back to Cruz’s childhood in Canada, where he was born.
They find young Cruz in bed, fumbling beneath his blanket, which “went up and down in a repetitive motion that should have been obvious to anyone.” His mother suddenly busts in and pulls back the blanket, revealing a flashlight in one of Cruz’s hands and the United States Constitution in the other.
It’s one of many instances in A Cruzmas Carol where Noonan satirizes Cruz’s rather intimate relationship with the Constitution, which he once revered as “the most extraordinary document in history.”
Indeed, during high school, Cruz attended an after-school program at the Free Enterprise Institute, a think tank run by Rolland Storey, who selected Cruz and several other young free-market enthusiasts to be part of a group called the Constitutional Corroborators.
They memorized different sections and performed at Rotary Clubs, writing them out and explaining them to crowds.
Cruz’s relentless devotion to the Constitution is rivaled only by his devotion to Jesus, though these two passions occasionally butt heads.
“Any president who doesn’t begin every day on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief of this country,” he said recently, apparently unaware that this statement conflicts with the Constitution, part of which states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Cruz is similarly passionate in his hatred of gay people and Obamacare.
In September 2013, he delivered a 21-hour speech attacking Obamacare on the Senate floor, effectively causing the shutdown of the federal government.
The House had passed a budget denying all funds for the Affordable Care Act, which everyone knew would never pass the Senate, let alone be signed by President Obama himself.
Cruz’s speech, which led Republican Sen. John McCain to christen him a “wacko bird,” ultimately only delayed the inevitable passage of a budget that included money for the Affordable Care Act.
His ongoing crusade against Obamacare is repeatedly and hilariously referenced in A Cruzmas Carol.
When Cruz meets the Ghost of Constitutionality Present, a giant bald eagle “wearing a maroon blazer, resplendent with weapons,” the two drop in on Roberta Cratchit and her asthmatic son, “little Timmy,” who is opposed to his mother signing him up for Obamacare.
“I don’t want a handout if it means increased premiums for other honest Americans,” says selfless little Timmy.
Cruz and the eagle soar over Washington, D.C., while the eagle blessed “a soon-to-be previously gay man walking into a sexual re-orienting facility for treatment. His sin would drop away like the crust of a (homosexual) chrysalis.”
One imagines an expression of unmitigated glee on Cruz’s face: squinty eyes and a creepy, compact smile.
Back at Roberta’s house, Cruz and the Ghost of Constitutionality Present find Roberta in the bathtub, where a “vision of a lovely dark bush, like amber waves of grain, greeted their eye sockets.”
This is American beauty at its finest, in stark contrast with the dystopian future where “all was droopy and sad” and the United States of America, now a monarchy, is ruled by Queen Chelsea Clinton.
The Ghost of Constitutionality Future brings Cruz to the Clinton coronation ceremony, which, naturally, reminds the Texas senator of a funeral.
Under Clinton’s brutal dictatorship, American citizens are required to wear “knee contraptions” which force them into submissive positions “with a mechanical unanimity.”
The contraptions are all inscribed with the words “Auto-Genuflectors Courtesy of Obamacare—Allah Bless America.” This is Ted Cruz’s vision of a dystopian nightmare, after all.
By the time Cruz returns to the present, shaken to his rock-hard core and relieved that the future was but a bad dream, he vows to run for president—to “sweep Roberta up, kiss her on the lips, undo her pantsuit, make love to her on a pile of United States Constitutions, kiss her on the other lips” and to “give Little Timmy a referral to a really good doctor, one he could pay for out of pocket of his own free will.”
In real life, Cruz gets his health-care coverage from Goldman Sachs, where his wife is a vice president. Now, with Noonan’s help, we can only imagine that they, too, make love atop constitutional texts.