Senator Ted Cruz of Texas stood defiantly against Donald Trump in the last days of the Presidential primary, warning, as former Texas Governor Rick Perry had before him, of the dangers of submission to Trump.
Today, his efforts in defense of the President are making him the object of worldwide derision.
As the BBC reports:
During a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Aviation and Space on Tuesday, Mr Cruz said: “Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea, nations have recognised the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors.
“Pirates threaten the open seas, and the same is possible in space.
BBC
“In this same way, I believe we too must now recognise the necessity of a Space Force. To defend the nation, and to protect space commerce and civil space exploration.”
Critics were quick to pick up on the notion of “space pirates” and have been barraging the Senator with images from science fiction movies and television shows.
Cruz has responded aggressively against the reporters who have written stories merely recounting the Twitter mockery which followed.
A problem for Cruz is that there are no facts regarding space pirates threatening us. He didn’t talk about foreign nations, he talked about space pirates. There is a reason for this. We have both a military, and intelligence services, which are currently responsible for protecting assets in space against attacks from foreign nations.
It is not that consolidation of our space-related assets in a single streamlined organization is necessarily a bad idea, depending on how that idea is implemented. At issue is the spending required to perform this reorganization, in relation to the expected gain to be received from it.
It has not been so long since the formation of the Department of Homeland Security that we have forgotten the arguments used against it… creeping expenses, expansion of government, nationalization of private enterprise, the inefficiency of government preventing the interactivity which was the main reason for the change in the first place… and that organization was being formed in direct response to a national emergency in the form of ongoing terrorist attacks. Those concerns have borne out.
The reason for Space Force seems, for many of us, to simply be an attempt by Donald Trump to have the United States spend billions of dollars so he can put his name on something. Space Pirates is an unusually bad argument in defense of that.
A quick Twitter check on “Space Pirates” or a search for memes on Google or Facebook will tell you just how humiliating a defense it is.
