Politics
Ted Cruz, the Most Hated Man in Congress and Texas
Has he destroyed his chance to run for president in 2024?
Ted Cruz is one of those very smart people who completely lacks any common sense. He also lacks people skills, empathy, and political instincts.
Reminds me a lot of that other guy. You know, the one with the orange spray tan and bad combover. Yeah, him.
Cruz was elected to the Senate in 2012 as a Tea Party candidate. Which makes sense for a politician from Texas. The problem was that once he reached the Senate, instead of falling into line with his (Republican) party, he chose instead to defy them again and again, accusing them of not being conservative enough.
He earned the ire of the party leaders. John Boehner called him “Lucifer in the flesh.” Lindsay Graham joked
“If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
Cruz gave as good as he got. When he ran for president in 2016, he said of Trump
“I’m gonna tell you what I really think of Donald Trump: This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth, and in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”
Which actually turned out to be true.
He also accused Trump of being amoral, a narcissist and a serial philanderer.
When Cruz dropped out of the primary, he endorsed Trump. Did I mention that Cruz is an opportunist? Once Trump was elected, Cruz became an ardent supporter.
So should it have come as any surprise that when Texas got hit with a winter storm for which it wasn’t prepared and people were freezing in their cold dark homes with no food or water, that Cruz hopped a plane to sunny Cancun?
No common sense. No empathy. No political instincts.
Cruz blamed his daughters, saying they were the ones who wanted a vacation. That he was just escorting them to their destination.
I blame his wife, Heidi. Heidi is a very smart woman.
Well, maybe not that smart. She did marry Ted Cruz.
She is not just a political wife. She met Cruz when they were working for the George W. Bush campaign. Both husband and wife went on to work in the Bush administration. She has been in the political world for a long time.
So it’s surprising to me that she would make a bone-headed mistake like encouraging her husband to flee a disaster. She should have encouraged him to stay and at least pretend to help. Instead, she organized a vacation getaway and then sent an invite to friends and neighbors to join them via a group chat.
Which mysteriously got leaked to the press. Heidi, Heidi, Heidi. You should know better.
Not only were Texans infuriated that Cruz abandoned them, but his actions look even worse compared to his 2018 opponent for senator, Beto O’Rourke, who has organized a state-wide effort to call seniors and connect them to resources to help get through the emergency.
I bet a lot of Texans are rethinking their vote for Ted.
Poor Ted. If only he had the political instincts of Beto and been the one to organize the phonebank. He could have been a hero. Instead, he is being vilified for running away, made worse by the fact that he left his dog behind in the unheated home, cared for by a bodyguard.
And just when you thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, comes word that AOC has raised $3 million and will be flying to Texas to donate the money to disaster relief and do a little volunteering while she is there.
AOC for God’s sake. Ted, what were you thinking?
And all of that enmity you caused in the past is coming back to haunt you. Chris Christie, onetime governor of New Jersey, has come forward to remind you and everyone else of that time you slammed him for vacationing during a government shutdown.
We New Jerseyans are still creating memes with the 2017 photo of Christie sitting in his beach chair on a beach that was closed to residents due to the shutdown. Bernie and his mittens have nothing on Christie in his beach chair.
Now he is accusing you of hypocrisy for flying off to vacation while Texans died. Ted, I’m sure that your mother told you when you were a child that if you have nothing nice to say then you should say nothing at all. This is what happens when you don’t listen to your mother.
Cruz is now scrambling to salvage his dignity and his reputation. The biggest concern, of course, are his plans to run for president again in 2024. Should he be worried that he has shot himself in the foot (guns, Texas, get it?) and ruined his chances of success?
I don’t think so. Four years is a long time. Political memories are short. The news cycle moves at warp speed these days. Yes, his opponents will bring this up, but by then other calamities will have occurred and this will be ancient history.
That is, if Ted Cruz has learned his lesson and next time runs toward the fire rather than away from it.
