“Then there is the saga of Ted F*cking Cruz,” declared John Oliver on this week’s edition of Last Week Tonight.
You knew it was coming, and that this would be a brutal followup to Texas’ week of freezing hell, and Oliver (much like the inevitable SNL take) did not disappoint. He tore up several members of the GOP over the fiasco (and we’ll get there soon), but foremost on the host’s sh*t list was the much maligned senator who managed to make his reputation even worse by leaving Texans to freeze as he flew to sunny, warm Cancun. Once Cruz felt backlash, he only spent one night in Mexico and booked a return flight of shame, only to blame his daughters for his bad look. John Oliver wasn’t buying the “mistake” and “good dad” excuses, and he blasted Cruz for deciding that “the first rule of fatherhood is throw your daughters under the bus at the first opportunity.” He continued while noting that Heidi Cruz’s text chain exposed Ted’s lies for all to see:
“I mean that’s just incredible. Ted Cruz (who remember, wants to be president) told the world he was bullied into international travel by twins, then got cyber-bullied into coming home by the internet, leaving his wife to solo parent two kids on vacation in another country while trying to figure out who in her mom group doxxed her. It’s all amazing.”
Oliver continued down the track, blasting Republicans for refusing to heed lessons from a decade ago and keeping Texans off the federal power grid, a move that ultimately left Lone Star State residents without electricity, heat, and water amid poorly aged tweets from their leaders. Also no surprise: Oliver had no patience for the Blame The Green New Deal crowd, which included Tucker Carlson, who received this comeback: “Calling windmills silly fashion accessories is just absurd.”
To Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who described the Green New Deal as “deadly,” Oliver declared, “He knows that’s horsesh*t” while detailing how Texas only uses wind power for a quarter of its total electricity while preferring to rely upon fossil fuels and thermal heat sources of energy. And to former Energy Secretary Rick Perry (who said that going powerless in an ice storm is preferable to federal regulation of the state grid), Oliver, who mentioned the ex-Dancing With The Stars‘s twelfth-place finish from a few years ago, had enough: “Oh f*ck off Rick Perry.” It’s a fair response.