How Ted Cruz might react to Ted Cruz’s Canadian origins if Ted Cruz wasn’t himself Ted Cruz:

Fellow wing-nuts, this man, this junior senator from Texas, this Alberta-born son of a Cuban father who didn’t become an American until 2005 and a Delaware-born mother, this Ted Cruz, says he going to renounce the Canadian side of his dual Canadian-American citizenship just as soon as he gets around to filling out the paperwork.

Should we believe him? Think about it.

For as long as this man could talk, he’s been calling himself “Ted” when in fact his real name is Rafael Edward Cruz. “Rafael,” as in Rafael Trujillo, Rafael Furcal and Rafael Nadal. A Dominican dictator, a Dominican shortstop and a Spanish tennis player. I suppose you could mention Raphael, the Italian painter or the archangel of the same name. What do they have in common? They’re not American.

Who else called himself “Ted” when his real name was “Edward?” Ted Kennedy, that’s who. Think about it.

Sen. Raffi Cruz says he didn’t know that under Canadian law, being born in Canada automatically confers citizenship. Raffi says he only learned it last weekend when it was pointed out by the Dallas Morning News.

Raffi is a cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School and he didn’t know what countries he held citizenship in? Think about it.

Fellow patriots, I’m not saying there’s not a lot to like about Canada. To begin with, they don’t call it the great white north for nothing. And to paraphrase a great former half-term governor of a state that shares a very long border with Canada, you can actually see Canada from land here in the United States.

One thing’s for sure: We definitely want to do Canada a big favor by letting them ship their heavy, sludgy tar-sands oil across our country in the Keystone XL pipeline. We could tell them, “Hey, pump it over the Canadian Rockies to Vancouver and ruin your own environment.” But think about it. That would be wrong.

We need to maintain good diplomatic relations with Canada, but that doesn’t mean we should put one of them in the White House. Do we want Wayne Gretzky posters in the Roosevelt Room? Round bacon at breakfast? Vinegar on the French fries, or maybe even that cheese-curd and brown-gravy stuff they call poutine? How’s poutine going to look at a White House state dinner? With doughnuts from Tim Horton’s.

Canada helped us out in the war in Afghanistan. More than 150 Canadian troops died there. But in the Iraq War’s “Coalition of the Willing,” Canada was unwilling. Why? Think about it.

That’s right. Large parts of Canada still speak French. When you hear the term “French-Canadian,” it sort of makes your flesh crawl. And we’re going to risk that in the White House? Hit the road, Jacques.

Fellow real Americans, let us not forget that Canada has socialized medicine. In fact, one of the first provinces to adopt a socialized plan was Alberta, where Raffi was born in 1970. His parents didn’t have to pay the ridiculously inflated charges that real Americans love.

Am I questioning Raffi’s American citizenship? No, I am not. He may have been born in Canada and his father may have been Cuban, but his mother was 100 percent American and that makes him an American.

It’s like a guy who had a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother and was born in a foreign nation like Hawaii … no, wait. It’s not like that at all.

If a guy is born Hawaii — a really big “if” — he’s a “natural born citizen,” as the Constitution says a president has to be. But what if he’s born in a foreign land? Is that the same thing? A lot of experts say yes, pointing out that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone and George Romney was born in Mexico and nobody questioned their right to run for president. But think about it: What do experts know? Man caused global warming? Please.

Brothers and sisters of the gun, I hate to bring this up, but in Canada, you have to register your guns and get a license to own them. Plus there are some kinds of guns you can’t even buy and they limit the size of magazines. Do we really want these Raffi Do-right gun restrictions here?

You think “Canada” and you think polar bears and plaid shirts and mukluks and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, but in fact this is a socialist paradise. You think of Canada as independent, but the Queen of England is still the head of state.

That’s right, England. Where did Karl Marx write “Das Kapital”? That’s right, Desk 7 in the Reading Room at the British Museum, London, England.

Think about it.