Sen. Ted “Cancun” Cruz revisited the Hannity show where he and the host once again pretended Cruz was just being a good father when he ditched his freezing constituents in the middle of a power crisis and jetted off for a luxury vacation he blamed on his daughters – as the two tried to make Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) the real villain of the crisis.
Predictably, Sean Hannity ignored the fact that Cruz’s “I was just taking my daughters to the beach” was an obvious lie cooked up to disguise the fact that he had planned to desert his constituents in their time of need so that he and his family could stay warm in the lap of luxury in Cancun – until he got caught.
But first, it was time to distract from the failures of Texas’ energy system by focusing on and vilifying a comment by Schumer. Hannity’s attack was similar messaging to what I saw elsewhere on Fox yesterday.
HANNITY: Here are some of the -- well, not so kind words from Chuck Schumer about Senator Cruz's home state of Texas. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER (D-NY), SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: The bottom line is Texas thought it could go at it alone, and built a system that ignored climate exchange. It was what's called resilient. And now, Texas is paying a price.
I hope they learned a lesson. When we build power, when we build anything now, we have to take into account the climate change is real or people will be caught the way the people in Texas were.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
That's exactly the wrong analysis.
Hannity issues marching orders to Cruz
Hannity all but held up a cue card telling Cruz to knock Schumer and federal regulations as his talking point. And Cruz complied.
HANNITY: Senator, Texas rightly - and I would highly recommend you stay this way, stayed away from federal -- federal bureaucracy as it relates to your power grid. And I would advise strongly you continue to stay that way. That's not what the problem really was, is it?
CRUZ: Well, that's exactly right. Chuck Schumer there was engaged in all politics and not focused on facts or reality. The facts and reality are that Texas has some of the lowest energy prices in the country. The cost-of-living is affordable.
There's a reason people are fleeing the state of New York. There's a reason people are fleeing the state of California because the cost-of-living is so high, that working men and women can't afford to be there. Whereas in Texas, the cost of living is much, much lower.
I'm going to guess that Cruz hasn’t tried to rent or buy a home in Austin lately. Or Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, El Paso or San Antonio.
Not that fat cat Hannity would bring up how expensive those places are.
And, by the way, people are not going to be fleeing to any place without a reliable power grid.
Hannity and Cruz talk a lot about Schumer, say nothing about Texans’ welfare
There were no questions and no comments from either of these two about how Texans were faring. Is the power on for everyone? What about the water situation? How did hospitals get by? Farmers and ranchers?
No, these two only care about the wellbeing of Republican politics which they seem to think depends on smearing and demonizing any and all things Democratic or liberal.
CRUZ: Now, we just came off of a very difficult week where the grid failed 4 million Texans. And so, we need to have a serious examination about why that was, why the grid came short, but one of the major elements of that is actually the policy that Chuck Schumer is pushing for the whole country, which is the Green New Deal.
You look at Texas right now, about 25 percent of our electricity capacity is wind. And yet, in the middle of this storm, that capacity dropped all the way down to 2 percent. You want to talk about reliability. The reality was, in the cold, the wind turbines froze and the power generation wasn't there. That needs to be fixed.
And, by the way, that's the solution Schumer is trying to force on the whole country. And right now, the Democrats want to federalize power in the state of Texas.
We need to make sure this never happens again and you don't have 4 million people losing their power. And I've got to say, Texans are ticked off that the energy capital in the world, that our grid didn't meet the energy needs of our state. And I'm confident Texas is going to make sure that doesn't happen again, not by doubling the cost of people of people's electricity bills but by making the grid more reliable and more resilient.
Cruz is lying through his lying teeth here. The fact is that the failure of wind energy had very little to do with the power outage. You will probably not be surprised to know that Hannity let the lie stand.
Hannity didn’t even ask how Texas “is going to make sure this never happens again” or how Cruz thinks it should.
Instead, Hannity and Cruz moved on to bashing President Joe Biden’s cabinet picks.
Hannity helps Cruz play the media victim for abandoning his constituents
Instead of urging Cruz to admit he made a mistake he deeply regrets, Hannity prodded him into playing the media victim again. Apparently, these two think that when a Republican is caught turning his back on his constituents literally freezing to death and then preposterously trying to blame his daughters, we should all just think about how Democrats are worse.
HANNITY: You dropped off your daughters in Mexico. You came home in a day, probably less than a day. And here you have a scandal with Governor Cuomo barely mentioned on these so-called other news networks.
You are like 24/7, because you dropped somebody off and you came back home. I still think you could be a father and senator at the same time.
And then you look at the scandal in New York and the cover-up, where is the proportionality from the mob and the media?
We've got less than a minute.
CRUZ: Well, you're right. And I think the media is suffering from Trump withdrawal where they've attacked Trump every day for four years, they don't know what to do. So they obsess over my taking my girls to the beach.
I've got to tell you, today, I asked Merrick Garland if he would open an investigation into Andrew Cuomo's shameful policy. A senior Cuomo aide admitted they lied, they covered up the policies that sent COVID positive people into nursing homes and may well have resulted to the deaths of thousands or tens of thousands. Merrick Garland wouldn't commit to it being investigated, and the media won't even cover it.
You can watch the “party of personal responsibility” accept none of it below, from the February 22, 2021 Hannity.
Debates between the traditionalist (and suddenly non-Trumpist) side and the likes of Hawley, Cancun Cruz, Johnson, the two know-nothing QAnon women and the like would be epic viewing, even for those of us just there for the bloody spectacle. Sure, it would be so, so damaging to the party, but Wrinkled Rupert could make even more billions out of it all!