Going to the dogs

If you were a dog, would you rather belong to Ted Cruz or Mitt Romney? Yes, you have to choose.

Last week Cruz made headlines when he got caught taking a plane for a family escape to Mexico while Texas was suffering through its stupendous weather crisis. Michael Hardy, a Texas journalist, went to check on the empty Cruz house in Houston and discovered the neighborhood had indeed had a power outage.

He also saw “a small white dog looking out the bottom right pane of glass in the senator’s front door.” Ted had abandoned Snowflake the poodle! OK, that’s a little tough. A security guard parked outside the senator’s house volunteered that he’d been doing some caretaking.

We will not stop to investigate whether Snowflake is a boy or a girl, or if we’ve got the breed exactly right. Suffice it to say that he/she was among the millions of weather-bound Texans Cruz had left behind when he went on, um, a planned vacation. Cruz’s story keeps evolving. His original claim that he was just dropping his girls off for a visit with friends faded when many Americans noted the guy was dragging a really big suitcase for a dad who wasn’t planning to hang around.

The crucial question is whether Snowflake got a worse deal than Romney’s Seamus. Any doubts out there, people? One dog was taken on a family vacation on top of the car and the other was left behind in a weather crisis/power outage for the ages down in Texas.

Cruz went off to Cancún, Mexico, after Texas was battered by snow, ice and rain, cut off from lights and deprived of reliable clean water. While he scurried back after getting caught in the act, it’s not likely a whole lot of his fellow Texans appreciated his explanation that he was just trying to “be a good dad.”

Yeah, tell it to Snowflake.