Ben Shapiro defends Sen. Ted Cruz going on vacation, saying there is nothing a senator can do about Texas blackout crisis
Shapiro: “Do they expect Ted to go there with, like, a blowtorch and start defrosting all of the pipelines?”
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From the February 18, 2021, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Meanwhile the media are going nuts today because Ted Cruz, apparently, is in Cancun. Now, I will admit that this is bad optics. Of course it's bad optics. Whenever there's a crisis, if you are seen to be having any sort of good time because our politics are incredibly stupid, this mean that you're responsible for the crisis. Everything in politics is performative right now. Members of Congress don't do anything for a living. All they do is gather once every so often to spend too much of your money. And so, everything becomes performative. Right? The reason why AOC is a star is because she goes to immigration facilities and takes photoshoots outside of immigration facilities being emotional in response to what is going on, apparently, inside the immigration facilities. I mean, the more performative you are in politics the better you do these days. That is just the reality of the situation.
So I get that it's bad optics for Ted Cruz to take his family on vacation to Cancun right now. It even sounds bad. But let's be real about this for just one second. This is one of the stupidest aspects of our politics. What exactly -- it's not a real-time crisis that Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, can do anything about. Because the senator from Texas is, in fact, in the United States Senate. He is a federal officer. Right? He is a federal elected official. This is up to the mayor of Houston and, like, the governor of Texas and all of the people who are state-level officials.
And also, I just wonder, what is Ted Cruz -- do they expect Ted to go there with, like, a blowtorch and start defrosting all of the pipelines? He can do what Beto O'Rourke does and he can tweet out a bunch of links of people who are helping out. I'm sure Ted's already done that. But the notion that the gravest of all sins is that you took your family to a place that is not Texas in the middle of a bad situation in Texas -- my favorite part of this is all the journalists in their heated apartments in New York who are tweeting angrily about all of this. "I can't believe Ted Cruz would do something like this." Oh, yeah, I see you there on the ground handing out food. Really well done there, really well done.