Ted Cruz, a newly-minted Senator out of Texas, has achieved some recent notoriety for his affinities with Joe McCarthy.

Here’s what Cruz had to say three years ago on the Harvard Law Faculty (from Jane Mayer at the New Yorker):

Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)

He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

That is a pretty straightforward claim.  Here’s how the Cruz camp replied:

A Cruz spokesperson defended the Senator’s claim. “It’s curious that the New Yorker would dredge up a three-year-old speech and call it ‘news,’” Catherine Frazier told TheBlaze late Friday. “Regardless, Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.”

“His substantive point” was that there were twelve communists bent on overthrowing the US government.  For more hilarity, here’s some Harvard Law School Grad defending Cruz:

Now, it’s something of a hyperbolic flourish to describe armchair radicals of this sort as people “who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

You don’t say.  And this is why we can’t have nice things.