Jimmy Kimmel Goes to Town on Ted Cruz

Jimmy Kimmel dedicated a huge portion of his opening monologue Thursday to Ted Cruz's trip to Mexico in the midst of disaster in his home state. "The hypocrisy is off the charts!" said Kimmel, who's made no secret of his dislike of the Texas senator. "This is the guy who two months ago lashed out at the mayor of Austin for going to Mexico," Kimmel went on, per the Daily Beast. And he didn't let up.

• "While his fellow Texans are freezing with the power out Ted Cruz did what any great leader would do when his state needs leadership most. He booked a flight to Mexico and said, 'Adios, amigos!'" quipped the Jimmy Kimmel Live host, offering up photos of Cruz on the plane. "There he is, snake on a plane right there! Headed, ironically, to the very place he tried to build a wall around."
• "But why settle for just being the planet's biggest hypocrite when you can be a world-class liar too?" Kimmel said. He then traced the story from Cruz's claim that he was only being a "good dad," accompanying his daughters on a trip with friends, to the revelation that Cruz had planned to stay in Mexico with his family through the weekend.
• In a statement, "he was careful not to say he was planning to fly back this afternoon because he wasn't," Kimmel noted. "He booked his return ticket at 6am this morning after he got busted. But I guess we were supposed to believe he was chaperoning his wife and kids to Mexico and was planning to come back the next day all along, with a carry-on bag stuffed like a piñata."

• "What were you thinking?" was the question from Daily Show host Trevor Noah. "Your people are literally eating snow right now, and you're jetting off to Cancun? I'm not even mad that you were selfish—I'm mad that you were so stupid. How can you be in politics for 10 years and still have no idea how bad this would make you look?"
• "I mean, look, I get that Ted Cruz is tired. The man deserves a break after trying so hard to overthrow the government, but this is not the time, Ted!" Noah added, per the New York Times. "When your constituents said they need clean water, they didn't mean go find a wet T-shirt contest in Cancun."
• "And what is even worse is that when he got caught, instead of owning up to it and apologizing, he acted like a total Ted Cruz," Noah continued. "Seriously, Ted Cruz blaming his daughters for this is just gross. Being a good father means putting them on a bus, not throwing them under one."

(More Ted Cruz stories.)