Watching the pushback against Senator Ted Cruz right now is like watching a group of kids who have been in thrall to a bully suddenly wake up to who he is and start working to cut him down to size. Republican members of Congress who were once his allies have begun to turn on a man who has become an outsize figure in their party since winning office less than one year ago.

“As soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats but from top Republicans, to hammer Cruz,” Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace said on his show. “Why are Republicans so angry at Ted Cruz?”

“You cannot build a congressional majority, in either party, for any kind of action, unless you are treating your colleagues with some certain amount of respect, and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of my idea?’” Karl Rove told Wallace, speaking of Cruz and Utah Senator Mike Lee, who are together leading the Don’t Fund Obamacare movement. “Instead they have dictated to their colleagues … and not consulted them about this strategy at all.”

This is kind of funny, they’re complaining about not having been consulted at all and yet only one GOP House Representative dared to vote against the Cruz plan. This is what it means to be a modern Republican, to act like a lemming, to have no personal responsibility or integrity while talking incessantly about nothing but personal responsibility and integrity. To deliberately repeat a laundry list of lies so often that you internalize and begin to reflexively believe them, while still knowing intellectually that your entire ideology depends on you being completely full of shit.