Ted Cruz did not own Deadspin

On Tuesday evening, noted internet sports tabloid Deadspin ran a link to a post from Monday entitled "Send Us Proof of Ted Cruz Playing Basketball." I don't understand why. If the worst thing you can say about Ted Cruz is that he might be lying about or embellishing his basketball acumen, you might literally be police. He's just absolutely godawful in ways beyond the typical, "member of party that is lining up behind the dumbass whims of Donald Trump".

Again, I don't understand the post or why anyone cares about these things. I don't care if Paul Ryan dabs, because the problem I have with Paul Ryan isn't that he's trying to a Cool Dad as much as the whole "condemning tens of millions of poor people to death and/or suffering so that he can get a tax cut" thing.

But Cruz responded, and it was pretty good. He sent a picture of Grayson Allen, the wildly unlikable star of the wildly unlikable Duke basketball program, who also happens to look a shocking amount like Ted Cruz. See, if Deadspin had done this to Trump, it would set off a Totally Not Mad Online tangent the world is not yet prepared to face. But Cruz poked fun (a small amount of fun, but still) at himself and it was fine.

Ted Cruz did not own Deadspin. He did not dunk on Deadspin. He basically did the Twitter equivalent of appearing on SNL.

And Deadspin did not own Cruz by responding "Go eat shit." But this wasn't even kind of funny. It was essentially the direct-to-video sequel to when they told Donald Trump "Go fuck yourself", the latter being one of the ten greatest tweets in history.

The key is context: Donald Trump was basically engaging in entry-level starfuckery. He saw Deadspin getting a ton of (deserved) kudos for breaking the too-weird-to-believe Manti Te'o story and Trump decided to make things all about him. He didn't even bother to get all of the names to credit correct. He couldn't have given less of a shit about that. He wanted to make Deadspin's crown jewel in actual tabloid journalism all about himself. He deserves to be mocked.

Cruz just made a semi-clever and ultimately benign joke. He then proceeded to respond to Deadspin's shit-eating reply with a decade-plus out of date Anchorman joke, because he's actually the least funny person alive. But the first reply was good. It just wasn't an own.