The soul police they live inside of my head

Commenters have requested a thread about Andrew Sullivan shitting his pants over the entertaining Times story about how Ted Cruz is a liar and his “friends” hate him:

This is, as Murc observes, particularly ridiculous in context:

And, of course, the same people who breathlessly reported on these emails as if they were the new Pentagon Papers, Watergate Tapes, and a genuine Alien Autopsy all rolled into one are now so concerned… so very concerned!… about the shocking invasions of privacy that Heidi Cruz’ texts and emails being made public represent.

Leaving aside the incoherent standards of people who were all-in on the months-long thigh-rubbing over illegally obtained emails that were provided by partisan ratfuckers and presented as scandalous although they contained virtually nothing of substantive or even prurient interest, I don’t see the problem with the Cruz story at all. If Goldmacher or Fandos happened to know one of the Cruzes’ frenemies and had gotten the information by calling them and then written it up as a “sources familiar with Hedi Cruz” nobody would think this posed any ethical problem unless they think the vast majority of political journalism is unethical. So what’s the significance of the fact that Cruz invited people by email? Nothing, except that makes the story solider.

So the only question is whether the story is newsworthy, and again the answer is obviously “yes”: it showed Ted Cruz was lying about something material to his performance as a public official.This is an incredibly dumb non-controversy.