Cruz: I didn’t come to the Senate to get 99 new friends

It's unfortunate for the country your Republican bretheren don't feel that way.

An old adage (misattributed to Harry Truman by Maureen Dowd) advises newcomers to Washington that if they want to make a friend, they should buy a dog. Ted Cruz echoes that advice in a new interview with ABC News, in which he says that his ambitions in Washington didn’t involve becoming a beloved member of the clubbiest club in the world:

There’s an old saying that, ‘Politics, it ain’t beanbag.’ And, you know, I’m not serving in office because I desperately needed 99 new friends in the U.S. Senate,” Cruz told ABC News’ Jon Karl in his first on-camera interview after the shutdown came to an end Wednesday night.

And he made it clear that he thinks his Republican colleagues in the Senate are responsible for sabotaging his effort to tie funding for the government to an effort to defund or delay the health care law.