Ted Cruz went to Cancun during a crisis in his home state and initially gave a lame excuse for it. Obviously this is comedy gold for our friends on the Left, and I’m glad they’re having a good laugh over it. The pictures are amusing.
But: real talk. This isn’t much of a story. It’s not about policy. It’s not about corruption or breaking laws. It’s not even about hypocrisy unless Cruz admonished Texans that they’re obligated to patriotically freeze in their homes even if they have the means to go somewhere else. (Nancy Pelosi’s trip to an indoor hairdresser, unmasked, when it was both unlawful for indoor hair salons to do business and for customers to patronize them without masks was, on the other hand, both hypocritical and also contrary to health regulations. She asserted that she was owed an apology and whined that being caught amounted to a “setup.”)
Cruz’s Cancun jaunt, on the other hand, merely made him look insensitive to other Texans. It was a faux pas, a rake-stepping, a political face plant for a guy whose face was widely considered pretty punchable already. This may be juicy gossip, but that’s all it is. It’s a stretch to call it a scandal.
As usual though, our guardians of the truth are embarrassing themselves and making themselves look at least as punchable as Cruz in the childish glee with which they are “covering” — meaning amplifying, commenting on, and generally exploding in spasms of ecstasy about this story. I count seven pieces on this in the New York Times, 17 pieces on CNN, and a mind-boggling 27 pieces in the Washington Post (so far), many of them clickbait meta-stories commenting on the fact that others are commenting on it: “How Cartoonists are roasting Ted Cruz’s Texas-to-Cancun getaway,” etc. The WaPo has also been kind enough to proffer such advice such as “Why Ted Cruz should’ve known this was a bad idea.” I kinda think people already had that one figured out.