Look Man, Sometimes Being A Responsible Dad Means Taking An Impromptu Beach Vacation In The Middle Of A Catastrophe

Texas is freezing. Hundreds of thousands of households are without power or access to safe drinking water; millions of people are effectively and indefinitely trapped in circumstances incompatible with their survival. Families are sleeping in their cars, running the engine to keep their babies warm, and being poisoned by carbon monoxide. Neighbors are huddling their families together in any nearby house that still has running water, amid a pandemic that was already sickening thousands of Texans per day even before a polar vortex settled over their state and for all intents and purposes reverted its shabby infrastructure to the Bronze Age.

And there was Texas Senator Ted Cruz, caught on surreptitious photograph with his family aboard a flight to sunny Cancun, Mexico, which is fully 1,700 miles away from the state he represents at the highest level of the federal government, where people are suffering and terrified and facing the choice between carbon-monoxide poisoning and freezing to death because the critical infrastructure has collapsed like it was held up by toothpicks. And then, what felt like mere minutes after that photograph blew up the media, there was the discovery that Cruz had suddenly appeared on the list of passengers for a flight from Cancun right back to the good old United States. Then came photographs of him shambling back through Cancun International Airport, alone with his large suitcase; and video, recorded by incredulous fellow passengers, of him disembarking (with a police escort!) at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

You can be disgusted by a monstrous dereliction of moral duty by one of the people most empowered to direct help toward Texas right now; you can join crescendoing calls for Cruz to resign. Spare a moment to laugh at this absolute goober's excuse, first!

Here was his first official statement on the matter, issued yesterday while he was still in Mexico:

And here is an extremely busted-looking and -sounding Cruz, trying out a version of this when reporters caught up to him in the airport in Cancun, on his way back to Texas:

His daughters had asked to go on a trip, was the line. Good ol' Dad was just seeing them safely to their destination, you see, out of grim fatherly duty. Not for Dad are the warm gentle Caribbean breezes of 80-degree Cancun! He is merely squiring his fair ladies to safety, as any noble old-fashioned man would, before returning, once more unto the breach, dear friends.

Even this feeble line of indefensible nonsense had collapsed by the end of the day—not only under the weight of its own hilarious tone-deafness, but because the Cruzes' friends and neighbors just straight-up ratted them out to the New York Times.

By the time Cruz spoke again to the public, this time from back in Texas (and with protesters screaming "Resign!" at him in the background), his line had changed a little bit: He was ready to acknowledge, at least, that it had been intended as a week-long family vacation, and that it had been a bad idea.

Is that how it works in your family? Ted Cruz's daughters are 10 and 12 years old, the same ages as my two kids. My two kids do not have a vacation card they can play at any time! There is no break-in-case-of-emergency glass over a red Trip To A Luxury Resort In Cancun button in either of their rooms, or anywhere else. In my family now, as well as in my family when I was 10 (or 12, or 17), as well as in pretty much every normal family I've ever heard of, the response a child gets to the proposal, "Dad, school is out for this week because of snow, I want to go on vacation to Mexico" goes something like, "And I want a mound of gold bullion taller than our house. Please go clean your room."

I just love the idea that Ted Cruz, who has never mastered any convincing impersonation of anything like conscience or decency or even a particularly well-informed idea of what people are like, thought this line—With school canceled for the week [because our state is frozen and has no power and no clean water and people are freezing and dying], our girls asked to take a [whole-ass] trip with friends [and my spouse and I said yes to impulsive international travel, in the middle of a pandemic, because we're rich and none of this really affects us and we can afford to just parachute away from any and all discomfort, unlike all the people presently freezing and dying all over the state I represent in the U.S. Senate]—would in any way modify, rather than highlighting and underlining, what anybody would find repugnant and atrocious in the sight of a U.S. Senator flying to a sunny, warm vacation spot in the middle of a catastrophe endangering tens of millions of residents of his state. These are the fabled political instincts of a dude once regarded as a near-mortal lock to ride Tea Party fame to the Republican presidential nomination, in action!