Ted the Turd

Meanwhile...

Dinesh D'Souza has Ted's back:

Such sacrifice!

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  Shamed into returning.  What's his story going to be?  He just went down to get his family settled and had no intention at all of staying? *

 

*Further update:

Frankly, would that be any less awful - that he took his family out of Texas while his constituents are freezing and going hungry?

UPDATE:  He says he just went down to take his daughters and their friends since school was cancelled, to be "a good dad".  The wife wasn't capable on her own? 

"With school cancelled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends. Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon," he said.

  ABC

Pretending that's all he ever intended to do. Let's see the ticketing receipts.**  I don't believe him, but it's still a problem if only the daughters were being coddled.

UPDATE:

The senator’s error is not that he was deliberately shirking his duty, but that he couldn’t think of any way he could help.

[...]

He was spotted on a flight to Mexico yesterday, amid a catastrophic storm that has left Texans without power, heat, and sometimes water, huddled in freezing homes and community centers as the state’s electrical grid verges on collapse. More than a dozen of his constituents have already died. Cruz is headed home today—if not necessarily chastened, at least eager to control the damage. In a statement, he said he took the trip at his daughter’s behest. Blaming your children is a curious tack for an embattled politician, but he doesn’t have much else to work with.

[...]

Cruz’s approach to politics and Texas’s approach to electrical generation flow from the same libertarian-inflected, low-regulation, small-government vision. In this worldview, the government’s role is to set a set of minimal baseline requirements, offer market-based incentives to ensure they work, and then stay the hell out of the way.

[...]

Small government won’t just take a hands-off approach to regulation; it’s also likely to take a more hands-off approach to assisting citizens in the case of a disaster. (I’ve praised citizen-led efforts like the Cajun Navy, but they should serve as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, government disaster relief, and all too often they have been closer to the latter.) Now Texans are turning to the government for help, but Cruz apparently didn’t see a role for himself.

[...]

A U.S. senator has immense unwritten power. He can use his connections, and the doors that a Senate role opens, to call on businesses and leading citizens to get things done. He can also use his political network to organize relief efforts.

Even a non-senator can do that. Democrat Beto O’Rourke, whom Cruz beat in a 2018 Senate race, said he’d organized phone banking to check on vulnerable seniors. But such a role seems never to have occurred to Cruz. He did, however, see how government could help him—drawing on a presumably stretched-thin Houston police force to escort him through the airport yesterday.

  The Atlantic

**Ask and ye shall receive:

UPDATE:

You think he'll have the nerve to ask for them on his return?***

Text messages sent from [Heidi] Cruz to friends and Houston neighbors on Wednesday revealed a hastily planned trip. Their house was “FREEZING,” as Ms. Cruz put it — and she proposed a getaway until Sunday. Ms. Cruz invited others to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún, where they had stayed “many times,” noting the room price this week ($309 per night) and its good security.

[...]

“Anyone can or want to leave for the week?” she wrote. “We may go to Cancún.” She teased a “direct flight” and “hotels w capacity. Seriously.” Ms. Cruz promptly shared details for a Wednesday afternoon departure, a Sunday return trip and a luxurious stay at the oceanfront Ritz-Carlton in the meantime.

[...]

The text messages were provided to The New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread, who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the text“What’s happening in Texas is unacceptable,” Mr. Cruz told a television crew at the Cancún airport.

[...]

“What’s happening in Texas is unacceptable,” Mr. Cruz told a television crew at the Cancún airport.

  NYT

Pretty bad idea for a deflection.

Speaking to reporters after his arrival home, he conceded that the trip was “obviously a mistake” and said he had begun having “second thoughts” as soon as he boarded the plane to Mexico intent on a few days of remote work in the sun.

“The plan had been to stay through the weekend with the family,” he said, framing the decision as a parent’s attempt to placate his two daughters, ages 10 and 12, after a “tough week.”

[...]

Mr. Cruz, 50, narrowly won re-election in 2018 against Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic former congressman, carrying less than 51 percent of the vote. In that race, Mr. Cruz had aggressively highlighted his efforts during a past emergency, Hurricane Harvey. He is not up for re-election until 2024.

If Beto wants to go up against him again, I'm sure he can take him. He can run one commercial: Cruz abandoning Texas for Cancun alongside Beto's tweet of the same day:

In his statements, Mr. Cruz noted that the private school his daughters attend in Houston was closed this week. But some other parents at the school were incensed when they heard about his international trip because of the pandemic and school policies that have discouraged such travel abroad.

Two parents provided a copy of the written school policy for students not to return to classrooms for seven days after international travel, or to take a coronavirus test three to five days after returning, which would keep the Cruz children out of school for the following week. (Separately, an aide to Mr. Cruz said he had taken a virus test before his return flight on Thursday; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires a negative result.)

[...]

Mr. Cruz had been acutely aware of the possible crisis in advance. In a radio interview on Monday, he said the state could see up to 100 deaths this week. “So don’t risk it,” he said. “Keep your family safe and just stay home and hug your kids.”

***UPDATE: As always, ask and ye shall receive:

UPDATE:

Does he think Greg Abbott is a Democrat?  Christ.

UPDATE:  Suddenly he's a servant of the people...

Help the man.  Ted can't carry this all on his own.

UPDATE: