After it became clear that Ted Cruz was not going to be able to fly to Cancún unnoticed in the middle of Texas’s state of emergency, the Republican lawmaker put out a statement that he apparently believed would quell much of the criticism he was on the receiving end of: The trip was his 10- and 12-year-old daughters’ idea. Even if that explanation had actually been the truth, it likely would not have had the effect Cruz was hoping for since blaming the whole thing on his young children just made him look like a shitty dad. But, of course, the “My kids made me do it!” line was a lie, which Cruz was caught in just hours later, after someone in Heidi Cruz’s group chat leaked incriminating messages to the press revealing that, actually, Heidi had told a bunch of friends and neighbors that they were “freezing” and that rooms at the Ritz-Carlton were $309 a night—a great deal, especially considering they’d be staying there Wednesday night through Sunday afternoon. Several days after the fact, and some shameless photo ops pretending to care about his constituents since, has Cruz realized the error of his ways? Does he get why people were angry? Does he see that he—and he alone, not his underage, unelected children—f–ked up, big time? Of course not! This is Ted Cruz we’re talking about.
Instead, he’d identified the real pricks in this whole story and it’s apparently the people who shared his wife‘s text messages with reporters, thereby blowing up his spot. Speaking to the Ruthless podcast, Ted said that Heidi is “pretty pissed” that someone violated the sacred trust of the group chat. Seemingly suggesting that whoever sent the messages to the press must be a rude, heartless liberal, as opposed to just someone disgusted with his hypocrisy and lies, Ted told the hosts: “We’ve got a number Republicans who are neighbors, but we also have a number of Democrats, you know, folks on our street who put up Beto [O’Rourke] signs [when I was running for reelection], which I thought was a little rude. But I didn’t, like, hold a victory party in their front yards when we won. It’s a sign of how ridiculously politicized and nasty and just…you know, here’s a suggestion, just don’t be assholes. Treat each other as human beings, have some degree, some modicum of respect.”
Insisting that abandoning millions of his constituents—some of whom were suspected of freezing to death—in the middle of an epic crisis was not actually his fault but the fault of his haters is a line that Ted has been workshopping over the past few days. Last week, he blamed the internet and “the media” for his woes, accusing his critics of spewing “venom and vitriol.” Last night during an interview with Sean Hannity, he claimed that he’s receiving bad press for fleeing the country because the press “is suffering from Trump withdrawal, where they’ve attacked Trump every day for four years, they don’t know what to do. So they obsess over my taking my girls to the beach.” Apparently when you’re Ted Cruz, it never once crosses your mind that you’re one of the most hated people in America because of all the repulsive things you say and do, which, for those of you keeping up at home include, just in the last two months: jetting off to Mexico when the people who elected him have neither heat nor water; helping incite a violent riot that left five people dead; and, we assume, playing Candy Crush on his phone while a person who helped stop the January 6 violence that, again, he helped cause testified before Congress:
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