Nobody Is Dumber Than the Conservatives Defending Ted Cruz
This is very pathetic stuff.
It takes an incredible sort of serpentine villainy to find yourself in the middle of a full-blown scandal, take a quick look at the political lay of the land, and decide that your best course of action is to violently shove your tween daughters under a bus.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Senator Ted Cruz (please hold your applause. For his funeral).
By now, you probably already know the story: In the middle of a cataclysmic winter storm that's already killed dozens of Texans, and left millions without power in the freezing cold, Ted Cruz was photographed flying to sunny Cancun, Mexico, where he originally intended to stay through this Saturday before people started asking, "hey, what's this guy's fucking problem??" It's very bad, and you should be burning with the galactic heat of a thousand suns' worth of rage about it.
But can we also take a moment to step back and appreciate how hilariously pathetic the various conservative so-and-sos coming to Cruz's defense sound? Even for people whose entire grift is predicated on swallowing whatever sewage people like Cruz spew into the world, this latest episode is particularly embarrassing.
Here's Ben Shapiro, apparently auditioning for a spot to be the next Micro Machines spokesman, explaining why this is simply a matter of unfortunate optics, rather than a grotesque dereliction of duty in the midst of a statewide calamity.
Personally, I would love to see Teddy with a blowtorch, defrosting pipes and generally making himself useful to the general population whose electoral preference he recently chose to seditiously distort. Or maybe he could, I dunno, use the immense power at his disposal to try and help get resources to the millions of people who need it? But I digress...
Joining Ben in the "form over function" argument was Erick Erickson, arguably the dumbest person in his particularly cursed corner of conservative Twitter. He tweeted, “The fact that people think Ted Cruz, a United States Senator, can do anything about a state power grid, even his own, is rather demonstrative of the ignorance of so many people who cover politics. They’d rather performative drama than substance.”
The argument here seems to be that senators are largely useless (which, okay, fair) and therefore should be given allowed to jet off to a sunny Mexican beach whenever they'd like, even if their constituents are literally freezing and starving to death.
It's an argument carried to its inevitable extreme by convicted election fraudster Dinesh D'Souza, who not only thinks Ted's presence in Texas is unnecessary, but would be actively detrimental to the state's recovery efforts.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but there's a part of me that agrees with D'Souza, albeit not for the reasons he offers; Texas would be better off if Ted Cruz was somewhere else.
Then there's bonafide internet fabulist Benny Johnson, who — true to character — simply recycled his 2016 Independent Journal Review video of Cruz cooking bacon on the barrel of a large gun, to make....some sort of point, I guess? I honestly don't know. Why would Ted need to go to Cancun for this? Is this owning the libs? Am I having a stroke?
There's something deeply pathetic about these peoples' need to run interference for a man so craven and cowardly that he offered his tweenage daughters to a mob of angry constituents while he himself fled the scene of the crime. No one is expecting Ted to get on his hands and knees and actually defrost some frozen water pipes — no one is expecting much from Ted at all. But would the bare minimum of something approximating human empathy kill him (maybe)? The callous selfishness at play here is so shameless, so taunting, that anyone willing to defend it is even more craven than Cruz himself. At least Cruz isn't pretending to care what people think of his Mexican vacay — not really. So why would Shapiro, and Erickson and the like insist on going to bat for him in the first place? Do they really think we're all that stupid? Or, more likely, are they?
Anyway, welcome home, Ted! Now please fuck off.