Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Beto: the Kang Candidate
I have long suspected that Beto O’Rourke is an alien, and not the kind that merely comes from another country, but one who may not even be from this solar system. His presidential campaign, after all, is a strange and almost parodical pastiche of exactly how conservatives have parodied the extremes of liberalism for years. It’s as though all he knows of being an “Authentic American” came from a battered bootleg copy of Jack Kerouac, and all he knows of campaigning is what he learned some 20 light-years out as the faint broadcast signals of the late 90s reached his starship, and the only one he could pick up cleanly was Rush Limbaugh’s brief TV run. Plus an early Simpson’s Halloween special that he misunderstood as a training video for his species.
How else does one explain Beto’s outbursts and truly bizarre proclamations? They’re not the sort of thing a sane and rational Democrat would actually say out loud and in public even in these crazy times (even if they were thinking them). Most politicians have at least some inner-monologue filter that prevents them from appearing honest or emotional, and they normally only disable that filter if they think nobody is listening (which is a foolish assumption anymore because somebody is always listening, somebody always has a voice recorder and video camera handy in the form of a phone). Romney’s “47 percent,” remark, Hillary’s “Basket of Deplorables,” Obama’s “Bitter Clingers,” and ¡Jeb!’s entire primary bid was all well-remembered political gaffes, not political triumphs, but one suspects Beto does not quite understand the context, and thus misses the lesson.
Already Beto bears an uncanny resemblance to Otto, from A Fish Called Wanda (Link here, language warning), reading the news and the signs of the times, but not understanding any of it. And so it was that after decades of the Democrat Party insisting that its drive for gun control and registration was only about safety, and would never ever pinkie-swear lead to confiscation, what does Beto say?
He wasn’t supposed to say that out loud! You never say anything like that out loud! You don’t say that unless you’re hoping to lose, and lose bigly. And if you’re hoping to take out a few others in your party too. I can imagine that after that debate the burly guys in white coats were waiting with the happy juice, but (since Beto is not actually human) it did not take. One would think that angering gun owners (about as single-issue a voting block as Pro-Lifers, and always tetchy since leftists are always singling them out) is something the Democrats want to avoid doing in a national election, given how motivated they are as voters. But not Beto. The filter is missing, and so is the understanding. About what one would suspect if he were either a fool or (as I am now convinced) a space alien.
After all, for his next act, Beto had to take a swipe another rather tetchy and under-siege voting group: Christians. One of the most overused arguments against religious objections to Same-Sex Marriage and the militant expansion of trans-rights everywhere was that such objections were unwarranted. Just as the Democrats have always sworn that they weren’t really going to come after gun owners, so too had they sworn that they would never ever pinkie-swear come ofter religious organizations, and certainly not ever after churches. Obama, of course, went and did just that, but at least had the courtesy to try to claim that schools, hospitals, and charity organizations were not valid (and therefore protected) religious expressions because they were not actual churches. Beto (aka Kang) has no such subtlety or filter.
Every one of my progressive friends: Nobody wants to do that
Beto: Hell yes we’re going to do that. https://t.co/Ncix2Vl0Jk
— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) October 11, 2019
Yes, Kang has flat-out demanded that religious institutions toe the political line or lose their tax status as non-profit institutions. At that same town hall, other candidates only hinted that they would demand churches to share their politics, and Beto, being a space alien, instead just blurted it out.
Beto O’Rourke on religious institutions losing tax-exempt status for opposing same-sex marriage: "There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for anyone … that denies the full human rights and the full civil rights of every single one of us" #EqualityTownHall pic.twitter.com/tjwVGqv5h0
— CNN (@CNN) October 11, 2019
I am convinced that Beto cannot actually be human. No human Democrat candidate would say this aloud. But a space alien would. In the 1996 Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons, the final short story, called Citizen Kang, showed space aliens kidnapping Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, then the presidential candidates, and assuming their identities in a bid to take over and enslave the earth. Kang, in disguise as Bob Dole on the campaign trail, blurts out:
Only a space alien would think first to say “abortions for all”, and so I’m expecting that to be Beto’s next act. After all, only a space alien would also have clearly said “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15”, and only a space alien would say out loud that churches had to voice a totalitarian party line or else be treated as a mere business (remember: the Dems don’t think businesses have any speech rights). It’s either that, or Beto just doesn’t want to be the Dem nominee. But I think he desperately wants it. After all, Citizen Kang is a training video:
So if (God forbid) he gets the nomination, or (even worse) wins the elections, don’t blame me. I’m voting for Kodos. After all, it is a 2 party system.
Published in Elections
Will he be brave enough to say it in a Mosque?
Wait, a what?
Robert Francis is the id of the Democratic Party. They pretty much all think these things anyway. And Republicans will adopt those same positions within 10 years of them becoming Democrat orthodoxy.
Great. So now some space alien is going to see this and say, “Is that guy saying we’re dumber than Democrats?” and then they are going to point the death ray at Earth.
Yep. He’s saying out loud what all of them believe.
A worthwhile Twitter Thread:
The Democrats’ cozying up to Islamists and their insistence that religion bow to Woke Progressivism were bound to come into conflict eventually. Didn’t think it would happen in time for 2020, but progressivism has put the pedal to the floor recently.
Spotted one in the wild…
Those have been extinct for at least twenty years.
Let’s hope the Muslims understand it all applies double to them.
This one thing I love about Trump. He makes the Left so insane they can’t remember to keep the mask in place and let us see their real face. No more posing as “moderates’, “centrists”, “pragmatic”.
I think it is quite simple. He is not very bright and a he is a narcissist.
The other calculation going on here is while Beto is from a relatively Blue part of Texas, Fort Bliss being there keeps it from being a deep Blue bi-coastal wanna-be area, like Austin. So O’Rourke had to play down whatever progressive thoughts he had while serving as 16th CD rep for six years, and it was that constraint that made him viable statewide in last year’s race against Ted Cruz.
Now, he’s trying to show the bi-coastal types that his moderation from 2012-18 was all a put-on, and he’s really one of them. But instead of doing it behind closed doors, Beto’s letting the world know, in hopes that whatever issue he blurts out at the moment will suddenly cause progressive voters and donors from all over to come flocking to his campaign, even as the smarter ones hold their heads in their hands over O’Rourke giving Trump another campaign talking point to work with.
(The other thing here is while the Democrats talk about turning Texas Blue, do any of them think Beto would have come within three points of Cruz if, during last year’s campaign he had come out:
— Against fracking;
— In favor of AR-15 gun bans;
— In favor of removing tax exemptions from the Catholic Church and any other denominations who don’t abide by progressive rules on LGBTQ issues.
Odds are pretty good that Beto would have lost his race to Cruz about the way Wendy Davis lost her race to Greg Abbott in 2014, by running for governor of Texas with a campaign platform suited to running for governor of New York or California. And odds are whoever the Dems nominate for president in 2020 will be running closer to the current O’Rourke platform than to the one he used in his Senate race in 2018.)
That’s not dispositive of anything, that’s applicable to most politicians.
They’re not completely unheard of.
I thought the left was all for “separation of church and state” . . .
I would say Islamist activists know with certainty that it all doesn’t apply to them. That is how they can be part of the intersectional coalition, they know on that totem pole they can pull rank.
Grover the Good! One of my favorites. He would definitely make my top ten. Might even come close to cracking top five.
Beto is why I always keep a board with a nail in it.
(All this Kang and Kodos talk make me think you’ll understand the reference)
yes and! Not only do Dems feel free to “drop the mask”, they are obliged to out-signal each other by being more extreme. When you have no principles and your only goal is to be more extreme, things rapidly spin out of control. Beto is a 1% in more ways than one.
Twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
Democrats believe they hold the only moral positions. Republicans and conservatives are nazis. So it is perfectly natural that in today’s environment of SJW dominance in pop culture that a candidate trailing by as much as Beto start spouting the extreme version of lefty positions. He isn’t trying to win over moderates or conservatives, he is desperate for attention from his base.
I see his un-camouflaged position as similar to Goldwater’s position: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. “
Place gun control, abortion, and religious condemnation as the only moral positions, and it fits… Put another way, gun control, abortion and religious condemnation are as universally moral stands to a liberal as liberty and justice are to conservatives.
Extremism in the defense of abortion for all is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of gun control is no virtue.
Sure, he is letting the mask slip, but it is attractive to his (small number of) supporters. They are tired of hiding who they are.
I live in hope that there are a bunch of rank and file Democrats in the Citizen Class who are daily being red-pilled by how insane their party has become.
About the only thing that holds Democrat Citizens together anymore is hatred of the President, which is probably why the Impeachment Circus was created. (Well that and the need to protect the Democrats who have been feeding off the Ukraine for the past couple decades.)
Is there any current Democratic presidential candidate who has not campaigned on some version of totalitarian tyranny based on his or her personal opinions?
They read it as “separation of church from state”. As in , “no church in our state”.
Assuming he is in fact an earth human, should his presidential bid fail, he will also never again be elected to office in Texas. But, he may assume he can sponge off his very wealthy father-in-law indefinitely.
The wall of separation separates in one direction only – the direction opposite to that from which the phrase originates.
Thomas Jefferson used the phrase in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association to assure the Baptists that government would not be able to tell the Baptists how to carry out their religion.
Of course now the phrase is used to mean that religious people are not allowed to influence how government carries out government, but government is allowed to tell people how to carry out their religion.
Or if we must have churches, then “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
EDIT: Heh. I see Glenn Reynolds referenced the same quote.
Or he may be so well insulated in his Democratic bubble that he has not heard any rationally expressed contrary opinion that he has forgotten that such contrary opinions exist.
Wait, this could lead to a whole new birther controversy. was he born in Texas or the planet Rigel IV?