Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz slammed a cartoonist at The Washington Post for satirizing the Texas senator's two children, whom he used in a campaign ad reading parodies of two Christmas classics.
The first-term Cruz said on Twitter:
He was bashing Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes,
who depicted Cruz's daughters — Caroline, 7, and Catherine, 4 — as monkeys leashed to their father's organ-grinder in a cartoon published earlier Tuesday.
"There is an unspoken rule in editorial cartooning that a politician’s children are off-limits," Telnaes said in introducing the cartoon. "But when a politician uses his children as political props, as Ted Cruz recently did in his Christmas parody video in which his eldest daughter read (with her father’s dramatic flourish) a passage of an edited Christmas classic, then I figure they are fair game."
With the cartoon receiving a lot of backlash, the Post not only pulled the image from the site, but it was also replaced by an editor's note from Fred Hiatt which stated, "It’s generally been the policy of our editorial section to leave children out of it. I failed to look at this cartoon before it was published. I understand why Ann thought an exception to the policy was warranted in this case, but I do not agree."
The video
featured Caroline reading "The Grinch Who Lost Her Emails," in an apparent reference to the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
In 2013, Cruz read the Dr. Seuss book "Green Eggs and Ham" to his daughters during the nearly
22 hours he spoke on the Senate floor against Obamacare.
Other "classics" touted in the commercial include "How Obamacare Stole Christmas" and "Rudolph, The Underemployed Reindeer."
The ad ran in Iowa during last week's episode of "Saturday Night Live" — and it was made to look like one of the show's own parody commercials.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.