It’s hammer time against Ted Cruz

| 4:00 pm EST February 21, 2021
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The Ted Cruz Cancun saga came, to many of us, as no surprise. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with what I’m referring to, in essence, Texas Senator Ted Cruz decided to go on a vacation to Cancun with his family amid a truly harrowing crisis in the very state he represents. Substantial portions of Texas have been hit with freezing temperatures and vast, persistent power outages. At the time of writing, nearly 60 people have been killed because of this disaster.

Needless to say, Cruz’s decision to fly to Cancun was legendary in its tactlessness. He’s wantonly stupid — there’re no two ways about it. Even fellow Texas Senator John Cornyn joined in on ridiculing Cruz, albeit rather lightly.

But Cruz’s blunder wasn’t surprising. Not in any way. Cruz, and many in the GOP besides him, have cultivated their political lives around demagoguery, cheating, venality, and cynicism. Cruz deciding to abandon millions of suffering Texans when they need him most was right out of the GOP playbook. Cruz isn’t a public servant for the sake of being a public servant. Like many if not most elected Republicans, being in office is about serving only himself. With public offices comes, for some more than others, an air of celebrity. It also comes with opportunities to enrich oneself. Oh, and sometimes it comes with the opportunity to serve constituents and faithfully execute one’s constitutional duties, not that Cruz has any familiarity with doing that.

If there were any opportunity for left-leaning media to expose Republicans for who they really are, Cruz’s Cancun scandal is one of the most brazen examples in recent memory, at least for an ostensibly sane man (i.e., ignoring Trump’s myriad scandals). They need to hammer Cruz on this. At the same time, they need to leave his family alone because they have no obligations to the people of Texas the way Ted Cruz does.

The Republicans are a gang of thieves—robber barons reborn in the post-truth era. If we could only get Republican voters to see the party leaders for what they really are, we would never have another Republican president. Unfortunately, that won’t happen. But maybe we can at least get some people to see the light.