January 15, 2016--TRUMP's "New York Values"

Ted Cruz doesn't handle criticism very well.

Donald TRUMP's public ruminating about Cruz's eligibility for the presidency--he was born in Canada to an American mother and held joint citizenship until a few months ago--is clearly getting under the very junior senator's skin.

Interviewed the other day on the Howie Carr Radio Show, he snapped that TRUMP should stop playing "Born in the USA" at his rallies, a clear swipe at Cruz, and suggested he should "shift in his new rallies to playing 'New York, New York' because Donald comes from New York and he embodies New York values."

TRUMP responded immediately, counter-intuitively embracing rather than denying those values. When has it ever been good for a Republican to say anything good about the Big Satan, a favorite conservative slur about the Big Apple?

Passionately, with his New York accent dialed up, TRUMP said that he does in fact embrace those values and feels proud to do so. Also to Carr, in his words, he said--

One thing it means is energy. You know, when the World Trade Center got hit, we rebuilt that World Trade Center and we got through and very few places in this world could have gotten through what we went through. I mean, I was so proud of New York, the World Trade Center, these two massive, 110 story buildings came down. Thousands of people killed. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

He added--"Anyone who attacks New York City will have to go through me."

If TRUMP and others, including some constitutional scholars such as Lawrence Tribe, are discombobulating Cruz by questioning if he is a "natural born citizen," how will he explain away yesterday's reports in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal that he failed to report more than a million dollars in very-low-interest loans to his 2012 senatorial campaign, loans from Citibank and Goldman Sachs where his wife, Heidi, at the latter is a managing director after serving on the National Security Council under Condi Rice?

Failure to report loans of this kind, not incidentally, are not just careless mistakes, as Cruz claims, but violate federal law.

And it will not be so easy for the Princeton and Harvard-educated Supreme Court clerk Ted Cruz to point fingers at the establishment of which he and his wife have been such comfortable members.

It will also not be easy to counter his former Harvard Law School professor, Laurence Tribe, who in an op ed piece in The Boston Globe, "Under Ted Cruz's Own Logic, He's Ineligible for the White House," wrote that maybe, in spite of Cruz's assertion that his eligibility is "settled law," that it may not be after all.

Nor will it be easy for Cruz to explain why he jettisoned his Latino name, Raphael, for the more waspy Ted.

Above all, will it be hypocrisy for Cruz to continue to slip into New York City as frequently as in the past unless he learns the words to "New York, New York"?