It’s been 17 years since Hurricane Isabel slammed into Virginia and left hundreds of thousands of us without power for weeks.

In the aftermath, Virginia Beach looked like Armageddon. Houses were crushed by falling trees that had been loosened by days of rain before the ‘cane hit. Cars were smashed. Power was out everywhere, it seemed.

But we were lucky. It was September, not February. So we roasted in our humid homes, which is not nearly as dangerous as trying to survive without heat in winter.

Linemen up from Mississippi finally got my neighborhood back on the grid almost two weeks after the storm.

I thought about a lot of things during the recovery. Not once did I wonder where Senators John Warner and Mark Warner were.

In fact, if they’d coptered in for a hurricane photo op I would have been annoyed.

That’s because I took social studies in high school. So I knew that disaster relief is the job of the governor and city officials who activate emergency services and coordinate with FEMA. I also knew that Virginia’s two Senators have no place in that chain of command.

Needing senators to get FEMA’s attention is a sign of corruption in Washington.

This bring us - as you knew it would - to Senator Ted Cruz, who flew last week to Mexico to escape the frozen tundra of Texas’ 100-year storm.

It was an act of profound political stupidity. Terrible optics, as they say. Shockingly tone deaf behavior by someone who’s considered a leading contender for president in 2024. 

Sneaking off to bake your carcass on a Mexican beach while your constituents are literally freezing to death? That’s your next opponent’s ad wrapped up in a big fat burrito.

But this was a political, not practical misstep.

Cruz’s dumb decision and his botched response when he returned may have damaged his political career.

But calls for him to resign from the Senate - and yes, there have been some - are insane.

Cruz is not a lineman. Nor does he drive a snow plow. All he had to offer Texans was moral support.

Frankly,  if you’re losing your mind over Cruz and attacking the senator on social media while giving a pass to that fatuous bully of a governor, Andrew Cuomo, you're a hopeless partisan.

Cuomo is literally responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of New York nursing home residents after he signed a March 25 order that sent Covid positive people into long-term care facilities while the USNS Comfort and the Javits Center sat by nearly empty. (The Comfort, with 1,000 beds treated a grand total of 182 patients. The Javits Center, a 2,500-bed field hospital, treated 500.) 

Cuomo no doubt feared that cooperating with the Trump administration by putting The Comfort to use might have made the president look good. In an election year! So Cuomo played Covid roulette with the lives of the elderly instead.

Spare us arguments that say Cuomo didn’t know what the consequences would be of his heartless order. America’s first real Covid outbreak was in a Kirkland, Washington nursing home in February 2020 where at least 37 residents died and 129 were infected.

Every governor in America was immediately put on notice that nursing homes were at risk.

New York’s Attorney General now accuses Cuomo of undercounting the nursing home dead by as much as 50% and then trying to cover up the numbers so the U.S. Department of Justice wouldn’t learn about his colossal screw-up.

At the same time he was sentencing the elderly to die, Cuomo was bloviating at daily press conferences, bragging about how well he was handling the pandemic. He even won an Emmy for his convincing performance as a competent governor.

If Cuomo’s career doesn’t survive - and it shouldn’t - it will be because his fellow Democrats exposed the lies and threats of this Covid carnival barker.

Cruz’s missteps are nothing when compared with Cuomo’s.

An earlier version of this post mentioned Tim Kaine as being a Senator when Isabel hit Virginia. A keen-eyed reader reminded me that John Warner was the senior senator 17 years ago.