Ted Cruz likened to a streaker at the Super Bowl for his inability to feel shame

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) received harsh criticism for his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference one week after he abandoned Texas during a fatal winter storm to vacation in Cancun.

"Ted Cruz is so tone deaf, one wonders if the gravitational shift of millions of eyes rolling at once feeds his life force," Erin Gloria Ryan wrote for The Daily Beast. "The never-funny Senator was at it again this week at CPAC, attempting to poke fun at himself for literally leaving his constituents out in the cold only a week ago. 'I gotta say, Orlando is awesome!' Cruz said. 'It's not as nice as Cancun, but it's nice.' Does he think that helped? Does he think at all?"

"Last weekend, I spent too much time wondering what "Cancun Ted" Cruz was thinking—or not thinking," she wrote. "Something about the image of him lumbering with an overstuffed suitcase through the airport, his Texas-themed face mask concealing what I could only imagine was a sh*t-eating grin, was a demonstration of Olympian shamelessness. The Nerve!"

She described the unique talent of the Texas senator.

"An inability to feel shame is Ted Cruz's greatest strength as a politician. It's a superpower. It is what enables famous sexual abuse ignorer Jim Jordan to whine about 'cancel culture' to Fox News' audience of millions. It is what allows a person to shoplift from a Walgreens in the background of a local news report about how much shoplifting is going on at that particular Walgreens. It enables a famous man to sleep with an adult film star while his wife is postpartum. And it's impossible to look away from, like the streaker in the middle of the Super Bowl," she wrote.

These qualities is why Cruz will remain in the public eye.

"Democrats and even some Republicans have called for Cruz to resign over the vexingly clueless vacation. But he won't resign. He didn't resign after he helped incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that led to five deaths and two subsequent suicides. Why would Ted Cruz resign over flying to Mexico, realizing that people were mad, and then pivoting right out of there a la Grandpa Simpson at La Maison Derrière? Why would anything happen to Cruz at all beyond the public agreeing that Ted Cruz is insufferable? With that and a dollar, I could buy a can of Sprite!" she wrote. "Of course, it's possible to think about more than one bad political behavior at once, and dunking on Ted Cruz is fun, up to the point that dunking is all that's going on. It would be best for America if shame experienced a renaissance, if all its Ted Cruzes woke up one morning after being visited by the Shame Fairy, suddenly horrified by the way they have conducted themselves. But until then, beware the canny and the boring."

Read the full column.