Ted Cruz has been eating his Wheaties. Or maybe he’s taking counterpunching lessons from former President Donald Trump. Either way, NBC’s Brian Williams is all the worse for it.

Williams, the disgraced former NBC News anchor and fabulist who was finally demoted in 2015 after having repeatedly lied about his helicopter having been forced down by enemy fire in Iraq in 2003, apparently thought it was a good idea to attack the Texas senator on matters of patriotism, geopolitics, and military readiness.

As the Washington Examiner reports, “On MSNBC’s The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, Williams dubbed Cruz ‘Kremlin Cruz’ for his ‘remarkably stupid lapse in judgment’ when posting ‘Russian propaganda, a recruitment video for their military, followed by a video meant to diminish the U.S. military.’”

To back up just a bit, Cruz had taken to Twitter on Wednesday to respond to the jarring difference between two military recruiting advertisements: one for our Army, and one for the Russians.

Our ad is animated. Theirs isn’t. Our ad includes the memorable intro, “It begins in California, with a little girl raised by two moms,” and it goes downhill from there. Theirs begins with a mean-looking dude getting his head shaved and training for war. The comparison leaves one wondering why they’re recruiting warriors and we’re recruiting wokesters.

“The ad has been ratioed hard, with more than 76k dislikes to just 4k likes,” mocks PJ Media’s Bryan Preston. “The Army’s response to criticism of the ad merits examination. Commenters on the YouTube video criticized the ad’s politics. The Army responded by shutting down comments.”

As for Cruz? “Holy crap,” he mused. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military is not the best idea…”

You’re telling us. By Thursday, Cruz was taking heat from indignant Democrats. So he doubled down: “We have the greatest military on earth, but Dem politicians & woke media are trying to turn them into pansies. The new Dem videos are terrible.”

We wonder, and we admire: When was the last time a U.S. senator publicly used the word “pansies”?

This was all too much for Baghdad Brian, who responded Friday: “So many things to say here, starting with, ‘Don’t we want committed and motivated members of our all-volunteer armed forces?’ Imagine how happy it makes [the Kremlin] to have yet another advocate among Republican members of the Senate.”

To which Cruz responded in six parts:

Is there a more pitiful example of corrupt corporate media than Brian Williams? He was fired as the anchor of NBC Nightly News for ‘misrepresenting events which occurred while he was covering the Iraq War in 2003.’ Now, he’s a left-wing hack at MSNBC.

Now, he’s throwing a hissy fit that I criticized the ridiculously woke video that the Biden admin put out. Williams accidentally told the truth, when he describes it as “a video meant to diminish the U.S. military.” TRUE. That’s the problem. (The Pentagon put it out.)

Now, with his trademark ignorant snark, he’s dubbed me “Kremlin Cruz.”

Cruz went on to note that he hates communists while Williams apologizes for them; that he was arguing for a stronger, tougher U.S. military message; and that President Joe Biden is the real Putin puppet, having removed our nation’s sanctions and rolled over for the building of a massive Russian pipeline.

Power Line’s John Hinderaker summed things up, noting the absurdity of the Democrats’ see-through efforts to appear pro-military: “Everyone who pays attention knows that they are indifferent, at best, to American military power, and most of the time they don’t try to hide it. … Is anyone dumb enough to fall for the Democrats’ nonsense? I doubt it.”