Passport Purist Ted Cruz Was In Greece When Texas…
Here’s a query: Is there anybody on Beyoncé’s inexperienced Earth who is as unhealthy at planning an appropriately timed trip as Sen. Ted Cruz?
One would suppose that, after getting dragged to hell and back for flying to Cancún, Mexico, with his household in 2021, after it grew to become obvious that his state of Texas was in disaster mode due to the extreme results of a devastating winter storm and a energy grid failure that left residents freezing in their houses — many of whom died as a end result — Cruz would make rattling sure he never did that again.
Source: The Washington Post / Getty
But no — standard Ted, totally different continent.
Over the weekend, Texas was hit with lethal and devastating flash floods, which have reportedly killed more than 100 people in the state. And where was Cruz when all of this started? Greece. Cruz was in Athens, Greece, vacationing while his state was (and still is) in a state of disaster once again.
But don’t fear, people. The senator representing Texas is home now, and, according to his workplace, as soon as he heard the information of the flooding, he rushed home from his European trip “as fast as humanly possible.”
But did he, though? According to the Daily Beast, the senator may have hopped on an earlier flight to get home.
From the Daily Beast:
The Daily Beast’s e-newsletter The Swamp revealed Monday how Cruz was caught touring the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, 24 hours after the Guadalupe River burst its banks, sweeping away dozens of lives in an unspeakable horror whose full results are still unfolding.
After we printed, Cruz’s director of communications issued the declare about his pace of return, including that the article was “a bull—-piece” that confirmed “no regard for the tragedy in Texas.” But the Daily Beast has reviewed flight choices for Cruz from Athens to San Antonio and found a number of that would have gotten him back sooner than his Sunday return.
Flight information reveals a number of flights from Athens to San Antonio, Texas, on Friday, July 4 and Saturday, July 5, after the floods hit.
While it isn’t identified how many seats had been obtainable on each flight, attainable choices included flights leaving Athens on Saturday morning and touchdown in San Antonio that night via Chicago, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Earlier flights had been also obtainable on Friday once the seriousness of the floods was turning into obvious.
Due to high demand, a number of airways also introduced this 12 months that Greece would have more direct air connections with the U.S. than it has ever had.
The criticism of Cruz’s response to the catastrophe in Texas doesn’t finish at his ill-timed trip. In reality, that’s most likely the least of it.
Cruz reportedly arrived in Athens on Thursday, just after he helped Senate Republicans go President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which nearly everybody exterior of the GOP lawmakers who voted for it has panned as a massive, burdensome blunder of a bigly unhealthy invoice that will cut food help and healthcare from hundreds of thousands of Americans while giving a tax cut to the rich.
Apparently, the invoice also slashed funding for climate forecasting, and that seems to be Cruz’s concept.
From The Guardian:
The National Weather Service has confronted scrutiny in the wake of the catastrophe after underestimating the quantity of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that triggered the deaths and around $20bn in estimated financial damages. Late-night alerts about the harmful floods had been issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with native emergency providers, can be reviewed by officers.
But before his Grecian vacation, Cruz ensured a discount in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future climate forecasting of occasions that trigger the type of excessive floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate disaster.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation invoice, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around climate forecasting.
An additional $50m in Noaa grants to examine climate-related impacts on oceans, climate systems and coastal ecosystems was also eliminated.
But, again, don’t fear, people, because Cruz is properly conscious that disasters like these require consideration, preparation, and intense scrutiny of protocol — after the very fact.
“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz instructed Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
Yeah — “we” may think about not cutting funding for such systems.
Of course, Cruz and different Republicans are at present wagging their fingers at Democrats and “the left” for politicizing a devastating catastrophe — as if it only took them all of six months to fully neglect how they responded to the wildfires in California — but is it not a political subject when the insurance policies of politicians may need exacerbated what was already unhealthy scenario?
Perhaps that’s what Texas residents and MAGA constituents across the nation needs to be asking themselves.
Don’t ask Ted Cruz, though. He’s most likely ready for a hurricane warning to plan his next journey.
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