Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, had been in office all of one month before The New York Times gave former-restaurant critic Frank Bruni 1,000 words to attack him as “The G.O.P.’s Nasty Newcomer” in the Sunday Review. Cruz’s crime? He had the audacity to do his job by questioning President Obama’s Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel and he refused to defer to Senate colleagues who, in Bruni’s words “are vastly senior to him.”

How dare he!