A vital point about the Ted Cruz scandal everyone keeps missing
Ted Cruz came clean because he had to. There was a paper trail as big as Texas proclaiming he was returning from Cancun on Saturday and not just dropping his daughters off on Thursday. Not even a gaslighting creep like Cruz could lie his way out of that one.
So Cruz made it sound as if he suddenly developed a conscience and realized, mid-flight, that he couldn’t exactly justify going to Cancun for a short vacation while his constituents were freezing to death. So he hastily assembled the lie that he was merely dropping his daughters off.
Some people are stupid enough to believe him, like your average knuckle-dragging, drooling, MAGA-hatted cretin. Others are dishonest enough to promote his lie, like Sean Hannity. After all, who doesn’t drop their kids off soccer mom-fashion in a foreign country? Happens every day, right?
I won’t bore you with the obvious, other than to say that no one but a moron is fooled. Cruz planned to go to Cancun and spend three days there because he could. He got tipped off by someone in his organization that the optics were going to do serious violence to his reputation, because he’s too stupid to figure it out for himself. So he came up with this lie as a measure of how stupid he is and how stupid he thinks everyone else is.
But there’s an even darker message lurking beneath all this. Cruz, like any other rich, privileged, elite, arrogant asshole, did it because he could. He was tired of shivering in Texas so he decided to leave. Wealth and privilege are the buffers that cocoon the privileged from the immediate consequences of global warming. Like most Republicans, Cruz is a global warming denier, not because he really believes global warming is a scam, but because, even though he at least suspects it’s for real, he also knows that he has a huge advantage against its immediate consequences, an advantage that only the most elite and privileged Americans share: money and power.
Make no mistake about it, Cruz is in it for the money and the power and he doesn’t give a crap about anyone else or anything else. No matter how hard he pretends, it’s little slip ups like this that give the whole game away. And because Cruz is too stupid or lazy or indifferent about taking care to hide what he really thinks, he makes mistakes, just like this one. Lucky for him most Republicans are low IQ morons who love to be lied to and are willing to lap up any bullshit that Cruz and people like him serve them on a daily basis.
But the fact remains, global warming is going to hurt the poor and voiceless long before it hurts the rich and powerful, and people like the junior Senator from Texas couldn’t care less. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.