TODAY IN CAREER ADVANCEMENT.

Donald Trump is such a self-evident nightmare as a Presidential prospect that we sometimes forget how bad Ted Cruz sucks. But today Cruz reminded us by revealing some new members of his foreign policy team, which went over like (nerd alert) Robot Doc introducing the Gas Gang to the Metal Men. Much has been made of the presence in this crew of Frank Gaffney -- the anti-Muslim obsessive who called Obama the "first Muslim President" and authored the poll on which Trump's Muslims-out policy is based. Noted, too, is Elliott Abrams, neo-con royalty and Iran-Contra co-conspirator, who more or less promises more Mid-East boom-boom if he gets near the levers of power again.

But less attention has been paid to Andrew McCarthy, former federal prosecutor and, as Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review, one of my favorite rightbloggers. He is a leading torture enthusiast who pleaded to have waterboarding exempted from prohibition in the treatment of U.S. detainees, partly on the grounds that "it did not cause fear of imminent death" because "the detainees were told that they were not going to be killed," presumably by their torturers.

McCarthy also argued waterboarding couldn't be torture because if you offered a prisoner his freedom in exchange for some waterboarding, he would take it.

But that's not the end of  McCarthy's offenses to reason and humanity. McCarthy also put out a book pimping the cause of Obama's impeachment -- to give you some idea, it's called Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment -- and, when prominent Republicans began howling that Obama was just trying to make it look like they wanted to impeach him, McCarthy went on Fox to assure Megyn Kelly that he was not trying to get Obama impeached (though, he added, "impeachment is in the air because the President does a lot of high crimes and misdemeanors").

Also:

• McCarthy doesn't like it when you compare horrifically botched executions to torture, either. But he did compare the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube to torture ("Why isn’t someone in handcuffs?").

• McCarthy was one of the original "birthers with an explanation" who flogged crackpot claims of Obama's Kenyan provenance with mangy plausible deniability ("Obama, as we shall see, presents complex dual-citizenship issues... What Obama has made available is a Hawaiian “certification of live birth” [emphasis added], not a birth certificate," etc).

• McCarthy scoffed at birth control subsidies because "you could have two second-trimester abortions for less than I spend on pizza — to say nothing of flat-screen TVs, iPods, X-boxes and the scores of other extravagances that the 'poor' in America manage to score without government mandates..."

• In 2012 McCarthy got in early on the liberals-are-destroying-free-speech racket ("We’ve been given the playbook and still we don’t see we’re being played. 'Pick the target,' Saul Alinksy said, 'freeze it, personalize it, polarize it'...") by denouncing... Don Imus making fun of Rush Limbaugh ("While Don Imus and the rest of the herd bleats over Rush, that is what is taking root. And if you don’t like it, prepare to be the next target").

Cruz and McCarthy are a match made in heaven.

UPDATE. In comments Muriel Volestrangler alerts us to Cruz NatSec advisor Victoria Coates' background -- as a RedState blogger. These guys are a step or two away from recruiting their brain trust at parking lot bum fights.