[There was a video here]

Ted Cruz has a favorite story from clerking at the Supreme Court and he will not stop telling it, and I would just like to know—why?

Cruz has told the creepy anecdote before lots of times, both in print and in person, but he whipped it yet out again last night during a town hall with Anderson Cooper:

So last year I wrote a book called “A Time For Truth.” In the book, one of the chapters is talking about the year I spent as a law clerk at the Supreme Court. It describes — the chapter begins with me watching pornography on the internet with Sandra Day O’Connor, which was a bit of a bizarre experience. It was the first of the internet porn cases to go to the court and the court librarians were showing the justices what the internet was and they’d pull it up. And the story I told, I was clerking for Chief Justice Rehnquist. They paired the Chief Justice and Justice O’Connor, and their law clerks were in this little room looking at this computer screen that pulls up hard-core porn. And Justice O’Connor leaned forward and squinted and she said, “Oh, my!”

This is a story Ted Cruz has told thousands of times before. He’s clearly rehearsed it, for some reason. It is part of his repertoire. The details may change, but the punchline—she leaned forward, squinted, and said “Oh my!”—is always the same. Then he waits for applause.

Case-in-point: When TMZ was still trying to expand its political coverage, Cruz was happy to describe, in detail, searching the misspelled term “cantaloupe” on a porn site. “She kind of squinted and leaned forward and said, ‘Oh my!” he concludes.

No one is impressed by this story and I wish he would stop telling it.