Ted Cruz's Cancun Jaunt Is the Move of Someone Who Feels They're Totally Insulated From Consequences
Ted Cruz's Cancun Jaunt Is the Move of Someone Who Feels They're Totally Insulated From Consequences
Any old-school pol worth his honorarium would have known that flying to the beach in Mexico while your constituents are burning the chifforobe to stay warm is an optic to avoid at all costs.
By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 18, 2021
I'm starting to doubt the benefits of an Ivy League education. Tailgunner Ted Cruz, Republican senator from Texas, is starting to make me wonder whether or not he might have been better off taking the world-famous underwater welding course at San Jacinto Junior College than he was going to Princeton and then Harvard Law School.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think the Tailgunner is cracking up a bit. For a couple of months now, he has taken to social media as a groaningly unfunny—but unambiguously weird—Twitter troll. (I keep telling these birds that snark is best left to the experts.) The other day, when a few hundred people called Cruz out for having mocked California last summer as that state went through blackout hell, he responded with a blasé “My Bad” on the electric Twitter machine. And, on Thursday, in a political move so maladroit that it’s amazing that Willard Romney didn’t think of it in 2012, Cruz got caught jetting to Cancun while Texas spent a full week as a Swanson’s TV dinner. From The Daily Beast:
Busted, Cruz came back to Texas in less than a day. If he were an average citizen, the DEA would be camped out in his den when he got home.
This little drama gives us yet another window into the fact that successful mendacity has come so easily to a generation of conservative politicians that they don’t develop the basic involuntary reflexes of the craft. Any old-school pol worth his honorarium would have known that flying to the beach in Mexico while your constituents are burning the chifforobe to stay warm is an optic to avoid at all costs. This is the move of a politician who’s begun to feel that he’s completely insulated from political consequence. Most of the time, this is a short route back into the loving arms of the private sector. Ever since the 2016 election, when he signed on as a loyalist behind the campaign of a man who’d slandered both his wife and his father, Cruz has been reeling through politics like a goat who’s gotten into the absinthe. Maybe it’s just the weight of self-loathing that’s made him that way. History will have to tell. But he would’ve been better off driving to Whataburger.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35551262/ted-cruz-cancun-texas-power/
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