Oh Ted! It Looks Like You Stepped in Something
Poor Ted Cruz, everybody’s always picking on him. Now they’ve found he’s buying copies of his worst-selling book and paying for it from his campaign account. Wanna know what’s not allowed? Hummm … buying your book from money in your campaign account, thereby enriching yourself.
Ted Cruz published a book in September 2020.
In the next three months, @tedcruz’s campaign spent more than $150,000 on books at Books-a-Million. https://t.co/hbVR3rPV4n pic.twitter.com/uhIFN93gZq
— Zach Everson (@Z_Everson) January 30, 2021
And you can see if for yourself here.
I gotta admit something, when I first saw this, I thought Ted was paying people to read his book. Honey, it’s that bad.
Maybe they can add a splash poster to the huge billboards telling him to resign due to the insurrection. Almost makes you want to take a drive hoping to see one of the billboards.
1At one point, I thought a strong debater, University and law school graduate, federal judiciary clerk, Texas Solicitor General, and successful candidate for Senator had to be bright.
Then I read more about Ted Cruz.
point of reference: “It usually takes about 3,000-5,000 sales to hit the WSJ bestseller list.”
List price on the book was $28.99, so $150,000 gets 5,174 copies. Barnes & Noble now has it for $23.99 (Save 17%), 6,252 copies. Books-A-Million now lists it on their website at $23.48 (Save 19%), 6,388 copies. Amazon retail price on hard back is $13.91, or 10,783 copies.
2Maybe Ted can donate some copies to the Donald J Trump Presidential Library. Shelve them right between the Post-it notes and shredded documents (replication of actual disposed papers).
3I expect Ted planned to use them in fundraising – perhaps “Dear Donor, if you contribute $10 to my campaign, I’ll sent you 2 copies of my book. For a $50 donation, you’ll only get one copy – and if you send $100 or more to my campaign, you won’t need to worry about receiving a copy at all…
(/sarcasm)
4I’m betting he used campaign funds to buy his own book then autographed them to sell them again at 2-3x the price. Grifter, grifter, scummy grifter.
5Wasn’t Jim Wright forced out of the Speakership and then the House over something just like this? Can we dare hope?
6Oh, Ted, you’re supposed to get the RNC to bulk-buy your “book.” Do they hate you, too?
7BarbinDC @6, however Wright was a Democrat. The odds of either Kevin McCarthy or Moscow Mitch disciplining one of their own? The odds are … never mind the sports line hung up on me.
8Remember when Trump had a book signing? Well, it wasn’t HIS book it was the BIBLE.
9If only we had a functional FEC to investigate and bring charges on stuff like this.
10Teddy sold autographed books for his 2016 campaign, too, at a ridiculous price. They’re still for sale if anyone is interested for their collection. The book in question here has been on sale autographed, too, but is now out of stock. Just wondering where $150k worth of books went. Nothing illegal about selling autographed books I suppose unless he used campaign funds to purchase them and then re-sell for profit. Just speculating.
11BarbinDC, yup, Jim Wright was hounded out of Congress for having copies of his book in his office, and people could buy a copy from his staff members. Not 5000 copies, just one or two at cost.
And he was run out of office by that sterling, stand-up family values guy Newt Gingrich. Who howled and bloviated for months about how crooked and dishonest the Democrats were. Then he went on the Great Blowjob Hunt, after getting paid junkets to Scotland to go golfing, and to American Samoa to whitewash the human trafficing in the Chinese industries there.
That was when the Democratic Party was scared of its own shadow, and figured that the best bet was … to become the moderate wing of the Republican Party.
[Disclosure: I got my first political fix at the age of 5, stuffing envelopes for Wright’s congressional run. And he always remembered me, even offering to nominate me for a West Point slot so that I could go to college.]
12Hmmm. Bank fees. Was he bouncing checks?
Very little on beauty parlor work, though, for a Republican.
13The *real* problem for Cruz and other GOPs is that I saw a stack of Obama’s books at Costco yesterday. And they wouldn’t stock it if it didn’t sell. It’s only been out for a couple of months, but 44’s latest will keep selling on it’s own, rather than become a monument to corruption in some warehouse…
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