Senator Ted Cruz announced his presidential candidacy earlier this week and his detractors quickly stampeded towards the TV cameras. Thus was much airtime wasted counseling that a lawyer who argued nine cases before the Supreme Court is “dumb,” that the candidacy of one of the most popular figures on the conservative right is “absurd,” that the eloquent Texas senator is a “carnival barker.”

Cruz isn’t my first choice for president, but there’s something insufferable about his critics lining up to smirk at his expense and hear-hearing each other’s insipid digs. There will be plenty of time to critique Cruz in the future. In the meantime, let’s remember three instances when he merited praise.

The first came at the Iowa Agriculture Summit earlier this month. Usually the gathering is an opportunity for presidential candidates to suck up to the agriculture lobby and pledge their unbending fealty to the wasteful, destructive, crony capitalist Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandate. And that’s what all the Republicans in attendance did—except one:

“The answer you’d like me to give is ‘I’m for the RFS, darn it,’” Cruz responded. “That’d be the easy thing to do. But people are pretty fed up with politicians that run around and tell one group one thing and tell another group another thing. Then they go to Washington and don’t do anything they said they would do.” “I’m going to tell you the truth,” he added.

Cruz is sponsoring a bill to phase out the ethanol mandate and didn’t shy away from it.

The second is on immigration. While most of the candidates have supported some mutation of immigration reform, Cruz’s opposition has been consistent. He stood against Marco Rubio’s efforts at overhauling the immigration system and was one of the fiercest critics of the president’s amnesty executive order. No surprise, then, that the Dream Action Coalition warned that Cruz “may be the most anti-immigration candidate on stage during the debates.”

Whether you agree with Cruz’s hard-nosed immigration position or not, his consistency puts to shame other candidates like Rubio, whose obsessive pandering to Latino voters led him to oppose his own reform bill.

Third, while Cruz gamed his position on arming the Syrian rebels, he ultimately came to oppose the president’s plan and wrote a fantastic op-ed explaining why. Cruz counted three reasons not to dump weapons into Syria: first, Bashar al Assad wasn’t a threat to the United States; second, the rebels fighting Assad weren’t any better; and third, it was likely that American intervention would inflame the conflict.

“It is not the job of U.S. troops to police international norms or to send messages. Our men and women in uniform have signed up to defend America,” Cruz wrote. Amen and kudos for taking a position most of the other drum-beating presidential wannabes wouldn’t have fathomed.

Again I’m not a Cruz for President backer and I offer him praise primarily because I want to annoy the panelists on Morning Joe. Take that for what it’s worth.