During the sixth GOP presidential debate on Thursday night, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo asked Senator Ted Cruz about a story that popped up the previous day in the New York Times, concerning loans Cruz took out during his 2012 Senate race.

The Times strongly implied Cruz failed to disclose these loans in a Federal Election Commission filing because he was trying to deceive voters and preserve his credentials as a critic of big-bank cronyism, although the paper conceded there was nothing improper about the loans themselves.

“Senator Cruz, the New York Times is reporting that you failed to properly disclose a million dollars in loans from Goldman Sachs and CitiBank,” said Bartiromo. “During your Senate race, your campaign said it was inadvertent. A million dollars is inadvertent?”

As a point of order, the campaign said its failure to submit the proper paperwork to the FEC was “inadvertent.”  They weren’t referring to the amount of the loans, and the amount has nothing to do with the nature of the reporting oversight.

Cruz was clearly ready for the question, turning it back around into a jab at biased media:

Well, Maria, thank you for passing on that hit piece in the front page of the New York Times. You know, the nice thing about the mainstream media, they don’t hide their views. The New York Times a few weeks back had a columnist who wrote a column saying, “Anybody But Cruz.” That same columnist wrote a column comparing me to an evil demonic spirit from the movie It Follows that jumps apparently from body to body possessing people.

So you know, the New York Times and I don’t have exactly have the warmest of relationships. Now, in terms of their really stunning hit piece, what they mentioned is when I was running for Senate… unlike Hillary Clinton, I don’t have masses of money in the bank, hundreds of millions of dollars.

When I was running for Senate, just about every lobbyist, just about all of the establishment opposed me in the Senate race in Texas, and my opponent in that race was worth over 200 million dollars. He put a 25 million dollar check up from his own pocket to fund that campaign, and my wife Heidi and I, we ended up investing everything we owned – we took a loan against our assets to invest it in that campaign to defend ourselves against those attacks.

And the entire New York Times attack is that I disclosed that loan on one filing with the United States Senate, that was a public filing. But it was not on a second filing with FEC.  Both of those filings were public. And yes, I made a paperwork error disclosing it on one piece of paper instead of the other. But if that’s the best the New York Times has got, they better go back to the well.

Another point of order: it appears Senator Cruz has not actually seen the superb horror film It Follows referenced in the earlier New York Times attack against him. The monster in that movie does not demonically possess people or jump from body to body. It changes its appearance, with the goal of getting close to its victim, so it can do what the New York Times has been trying to do to Ted Cruz.