What? Ted Cruz Did *Another* Disaster Hypocrisy? Well, Yeah, Obligatory, Really.
Well knock me over with a feather. Or a fucking flash flood.
Famous podcaster Ted Cruz of Texas, who also moonlights as a Republican US Senator between podcasts and appearances on Fox News, is very sensitive about decorum and civility, at least when there’s a good partisan reason to act like he is. Asked whether a flash flood warning system might have led to faster evacuations, and reduced the horrifying loss of life, Cruz said at a news conference Monday that it’s just terrible — and so sadly predictable! — to see people “engaging in, I think, partisan games and trying to blame their political opponents for a natural disaster.”
Note that the reporter asked about whether a warning system would have saved lives, not whether state and local officials caused the floods, which really would be a terrible thing to say. We’re sure you caught that very subtle rhetorical shift, because Wonkette readers are incredibly smart, thoughtful readers.
And in fact, Kerr County, site of the worst flooding and the location of that summer camp where 27 little girls died (another 10 girls and one camp counselor remain missing), never got around to upgrading its flash flood warning system, despite the efforts of several (now retired) county officials who pointed to the many summer camps and said lives were at stake. Since 2016, county officials fought a losing political battle to fund the upgrades, but Texas state government never responded to multiple requests for funding. Hmm. Which party has controlled Texas government all this century? Sorry, we almost pointed a finger.
Oh, yes, and the current Kerr County Judge Rob Kelly (“judge” is just Texas’s weird title for the top county elected official) says that there’s no warning system because “Taxpayers won’t pay for it.” Damn our hyperactive finger!
Cruz went on, lamenting several prominent natural disasters in his state, but for some reason leaving one out. Yeah, you know which one.
And you see that with a hurricane, with a tornado, with the wildfire, with this flooding where people immediately say, well, the hurricane is Donald Trump’s fault. You know, look, that... I think most normal Americans know that’s ridiculous, and I think this is not a time for partisan finger-pointing and attacks.”
“The wildfire” Sen. Cancun Cruz was referring to was, of course, Texas’s largest wildfire ever, the February 2024 Smokehouse Creek fires in the Texas panhandle, which burned across multiple counties and even into Oklahoma, burning over a million acres, killing two people and many livestock, and causing over a billion dollars worth of damage.
Oh, you didn’t think Cruz was criticizing partisan games and finger-pointing during the more recent fires in Los Angeles, did you? Hell naw, Cancun Ted was all in on that, because of course California Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass made “catastrophic policy decisions” that allowed the fires to burn out of control, as did twisted woke priorities, and even after the fires, mean Gavin Newsom wouldn’t even allow the great American tradition of price gouging that would have at least allowed wealthier displaced people to find housing.
Now don’t you dare criticize Cruz for vacationing in Greece while Texas was being flooded, because he came back to Texas as soon as he could … just not on the first available flights, is all.
Let’s just briefly review some of the things Cruz said about the LA fires, shall we? Let’s start with a little truth sandwich: Over the course of 2024, LA firefighters negotiated a new contract that added $53 million in payroll to the city budget. The City Council approved $58 million in new fire trucks and other materiel, so even with a $17 million cut in other parts of the LAFD’s billion-dollar annual budget, the city’s total spending on the fire department increased by seven percent over the previous year. Here’s why having those facts in your noggin matters: Cruz, like others on the Right, was quick to seize only on the cuts, never mentioning the total budget, and leaving out the other spending increases, which came later in 2024.
Cruz also joined in the rightwing pile-on claiming that “DEI” did the fires, insisting to NOTUS that “of course” DEI made the disaster worse, duh, just listen to his podcast, where there was “40 minutes of content of me explaining why.” So hey, they listened to the damn thing and heard him lying that “the top three officials in the LA Fire Department appointed by the mayor are all lesbian women, and they’re all named Kristine.” Well gosh, lesbians can’t possibly fight fires, or run a fire department, whereas manly men can easily stop the 98-mph winds that drove the fires just by staring them down and flexing their manly muscles.
Cruz also griped that Los Angeles had wasted all its money on supporting (with very tiny grants) “a transgender cafe” and “a gay men’s choir” instead of spending the money on the fire department.
Heck, Cruz even amplified Donald Trump’s lies that the fires could have been prevented by better “forest management” (they didn’t start in or burn forests) and California’s “insane water policies.” (LA had plenty of water. Water pressure was low because its water system wasn’t designed to fight multiple record-setting fires across the entire LA area.)
Even before his jaunt to Cancun to escape Texas’s failed power grid during that 2021 winter storm, he was mocking California’s calls to conserve energy during a 2020 heat wave, tweeting,
California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity.
Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide.
Hope you don’t like air conditioning!
Golly, he sure does hate finger pointing.
Also, since extreme weather and threats to people’s lives are all wrapped up in climate change, let’s just take a moment to zoom out: Climate change was a huge factor in the LA fires, contributing to the heavy rain/drought cycle that caused a lot of dry vegetation, and of course to the hellish winds that drove the fires.
Climate change is also a major contributor to the floods in Texas — everywhere, really — because 1) a hotter atmosphere causes far more unstable weather patterns, complicating forecasting, and 2) a warmer atmosphere holds more water, which meant that the storms this week have dumped far more water on Texas (that was also a huge factor in the massive rainfall from recent hurricanes).
Even in 2025, Ted Cruz thinks climate change isn’t real, and of course he authored the very section of the Big Fugly Fuck America Bill that slashes weather and climate research.
Cruz added language to the bill 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 weather forecasting.
A further $50m in NOAA grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems and coastal ecosystems was also removed.
Cruz will no doubt insist his hands are clean, since those cuts did nothing about NOAA and Weather Service funding before these particular storms. So Cruz only designed and voted for future extreme weather deaths, OK? Well, those and any that can be attributed to all the global warming he and the entire Republican Party have done all in their power to make worse, for as long as he’s been in politics.
At Monday’s news conference, Cruz also denied that anyone in Texas could have been harmed by staffing cuts at NOAA and the Weather Service, don’t be ridiculous. He said that sure, people might have been evacuated sooner, but scoffed at all the very unfair finger-pointing:
“Some are eager to point at the National Weather Service and saying that cuts there led to to a lack of warning,” the Republican senator told reporters on Monday. “I think that’s contradicting by the facts and if you look in the facts in particular number one and these warnings went out hours before the flood became a true emergency.”
True enough: It appears that the forecasts were about as accurate as possible — or at least nobody’s done any reporting showing that the cuts in weather-balloon launching had any impact — but Cruz conveniently ignored a fact that we’ve known since the New York Times reported on it Saturday: The cuts forced the early retirement of Paul Yura, the warning coordination meteorologist at NWS’s San Antonio office, after a 32-year career with the Weather Service. The San Antonio office has responsibility for Kerr County, talk about a coincidence.
As local TV news reported back in April, that’s sort of a big deal, since Yura held the second-highest position in the office. As NOAA’s website explains, the warning coordination meteorologist at every NWS office “coordinates the warning function of the office with the outside world. This would include heading the Skywarn Program, conducting spotter training, and being a voice to the local media for the office.”
That job is still unfilled. And other Texas NWS offices that serve the areas hit by flooding are also missing critical staff, as the Times reported.
We can see why Ted Cruz wants to discourage finger pointing. He knows exactly where those fingers are aimed, and he knows they have the right target.
[Click2Houston / Texas Tribune / Daily Beast / NOTUS / Guardian / NYT / KXAN]
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>>people immediately say, well, the hurricane is Donald Trump’s fault. You know, look, that... I think most normal Americans know that’s ridiculous, and I think this is not a time for partisan finger-pointing and attacks.”<<
Your batshit insane colleague MTG LITERALLY blamed the floods on Democrats seeding the fucking clouds, you worthless chud.
Trump has threatened to withhold disaster relief to blue states and cities.
Anyone accusing Dems of “politicizing this tragedy” can get bent.