Three cheers for capitalism, where even a politician’s faux pas can be converted to a sellable commodity.

I’m talking about Cruzgate, the unfortunate incident that kept Ted Cruz’s name top trending on social media on Tuesday. If you missed it, Jennifer Van Laar covered it here.

Basically, Senator Cruz’s Twitter account seems to have “liked” an image from a hardcore pornography account, titled “Sexuall Posts.”

I’m not sure if Cruz woke on Tuesday morning, logged on to check his social media accounts, only to find he was sitting at the top of trending topics, and then found out why, or if Heidi woke him up by dumping scalding, hot coffee on his head, but either way, he responded.

He was actually pretty casual about it, which is really the only option he had. Getting too excited about it would have caused a feeding frenzy in the left-tilting media, no doubt.

Cruz blamed a “staffing issue” for his account having liked the tweet, which featured a clip of a hardcore pornography scene.

“There are a number of people on the team that have access to the account and it appears that someone inadvertently hit the like button,” Cruz said.

Plausible.

Somewhat.

It’s very likely that a staffer with a fetish forgot to log out of the Cruz account before they got “distracted.” Quite often, the social media accounts of politicians are operated by staffers, with the occasional, actual post from the account holder.

The “inadvertently” part is a little harder to explain, but, whatever.

Inadvertent or not, the creators of the “Sexuall Posts” account have taken the controversy and immediately went to market with it, creating a website and pimping merchandise.

Normally, I would link to the tweet here, but because of the nature of the site, I’m going to just not.

They even created a website called SexualTed (dot) com.

“Sexuall Posts,” the name of the account, is selling T-shirts, mugs and sweatshirts all featuring the senator’s name or likeness and making sexual innuendos about Cruz.

One shirt features a “Ted 2020” logo with miniature versions of the Twitter logo surrounding it.

Another is an image of Cruz, along with “MasturbaTED,” in a play on Cruz’s name that was seen in other forms often during the 2016 primary season.

I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction.

At some Cruz event, in the very near future, somebody will show up with one of these shirts.

You heard it here, first, folks.