Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was hanging out in Montana this weekend, it seems. We only know this because someone who was at the Bozeman Airport on Sunday filmed Cruz freaking out about missing the check-in for his flight. The person posted the video to Reddit and wrote that based on what they heard and what others in the vicinity of the Texan gathered, Cruz was making a scene and demanding special treatment because rescheduling a flight back was going to be a hassle, as it is spring break!
It isn’t an uncommon scene at an airport, but when a sitting U.S. senator is making enough of a scene that the airport decides to bring in a public safety officer to deescalate the situation, it says something about that senator. According to the person who posted the video (which can be seen below), Cruz made “thinly veiled threats towards the employment of the people involved,” by “Demanding their names and threatening to call corporate” when he wasn’t given special treatment.
This comes just one year after Teddy decided to plan a spring break-style vacation with his kids to Cancun ,Mexico, while the rest of the citizens in his state suffered under freezing temperatures and a massive natural disaster. More egregious still was that a big reason many of the citizens in the Lone Star State were freezing in their homes after losing power during a winter storm was because of a neglected infrastructure that lacked upgrades. It was at this point that the big man Ted Cruz went in front of the cameras and blamed his children for his lack of backbone.
The Daily Mail reports that Bozeman airport's deputy director Scott Humphrey told them that a public safety officer (PSO) was called, which is routine when customers get heated about missing flights and want to blame airport staff for their own mistakes. Whether or not Cruz tried to throw his weight around is not exactly known, though it does not seem like it would have mattered anyway. “Our PSO didn’t realize he was dealing with Senator Cruz until after the fact,” Humphrey said.
In recent months, Cruz has been one of a few Republicans to support loathsome and dangerous behavior by airline passengers. Last month, Cruz signed a letter telling Attorney General Merrick Garland that people potentially facing prosecution for attacking airline workers both physically and verbally should be let off the hook.
You might also remember that a couple of months into the ongoing global pandemic that has claimed closed to 1 million American lives in the past two years, Cruz was investigated by American Airlines after images of him going maskless throughout the airport and during a flight went viral. This, of course, was before there were COVID vaccines.
This incident also comes less than 10 days after Cruz played pretend working-man’s-trucker-hero during a political theater press conference in Washington, D.C. During that joke of a meeting, Cruz made this statement of make-believe: “Every week I fly back and forth to Houston. Almost without exception, every time I’m on an airplane, either the captain or a flight attendant will come up to me, will hug me and say, ‘Thank you for fighting for us.’”
Looks like it is more likely that every time he flies “either the captain or a flight attendant will come up to” Ted Cruz and say something along the lines of “Please sir, sit down,” or “Would you please stop acting like a Ted Cruz-type person.”
Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos' The Brief podcast with Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld