Ted Cruz Briefly Liked Porn on Twitter Last Night & It Was a Gift to the Internet

Late Monday night, Internet lurkers and Weird Politics Twitter got tipped off to a NSFW video in Sen. Ted Cruz's "likes"— a low-quality video shared from an account called "Sexuall Posts" [sic]. The two minute video stayed visible in that column of his verified page for about an hour before it was unliked, but it was still more than long enough for the junior senator from Texas to get thoroughly roasted over the slip-up.

Catherine Frazier,  Cruz's press director tweeted early on Tuesday that "The offensive tweet posted on @tedcruz account earlier has been removed by staff and reported to Twitter."

Meanwhile, the "Sexual Posts" account tweeted a "thanks for watching" to Cruz and changed their bio to promote their page with "Follow for the Same Porn @TedCruz Watches." Yikes. 

While plenty of normal humans watch porn (and don't deserve to be repeatedly dunked on by the Internet), the case of Sen. Cruz publicly liking this video is an interesting one when you consider his inherently sex negative history of anti-choice legislation, anti-birth control legislation and rhetoric. It's a bit harder to be a puritanical character legislatively policing the morality of others with porn on your dash, you know?

And, of course, there's that one time he assisted in a case attempting to ban the sale of sex toys in Texas (no, really.) 

As Mother Jones' David Corn wrote last year, Ted Cruz actually defended the case to ban "dildos, artificial vaginas, and other obscene devices" and argued that using the aforementioned toys were similar to "hiring a willing prostitute" (uh) before finally concluding that "there is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one's genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship."

While no one ever wants to repeatedly hear about politicians old enough to be their dad and stimulation of any kind, the "Sexuall Posts" tweet gave many of Cruz's critics to pounce on his apparent hypocracy and find a little bit of light in the deeply uncomfortable situation before them: 

If we take anything away from this, let it be this: Your Twitter likes are not private and late-night Twitter has no mercy.