Because Trump has sucked all the air out of the room, we’ve missed other great feats of teh stoopid being done by various candidates.

For example, Ted Cruz and his embarassment of a “hearing” about climate change:

Ted Cruz derides climate change at hearing

Sen. Ted Cruz leaned on one of his favorite arguments Tuesday, building an entire Senate subcommittee hearing on climate change around the notion that satellite data proves that Earth’s temperatures have flat-lined over the last 18 years.

“There has been no significant global warming in the past 18 years,” he said. “Global warming alarmists don’t like these data. They are inconvenient truths, as Al Gore might say. But facts and evidence matters.”

But when faced with a large scrum of reporters after the hearing, Cruz talked past questions pointing out that 1998 — his baseline for arguing Earth’s warming has paused — was at the time the hottest year ever recorded. And that, give or take a few tiny variations, nearly every year since has been as hot or hotter.

[…]

But Cruz opened the hearing by declaring that, as the son of two mathematicians, he was determined to see scientific integrity defended in the face of what he says is a near-total conspiracy of reporters, scientists and Democrats to silence any who dare question the orthodoxy.

“It’s like the Inquisition,” he said, arguing that advocates of policies to fight global warming have borrowed the “language of the Roman inquisitors” by all but branding scientists like the panelists he had invited to testify as “heretics.”

Three of the four panelists were scientists with well-known views that the global consensus over climate change is based on fear and groupthink. A fourth invited by Cruz was Mark Steyn, a Canadian activist and author who bills himself as “the one-man global content provider.”

[…]

Cruz claimed victory after the hearing. He said his witnesses had produced uncontroverted evidence that what most people think they know about climate change is wrong. He said Democrats and the news media mislead the public in order to grant the federal government control of vast portions of the economy.

[…]

Cruz is a deceiving conspiratorial loon. And that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.