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Beto O'Rourke Campaign Looks To Cash In on Texas Massacre by Selling Vulgar Shirt

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Former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke is selling T-shirts based on his profane rants in the wake of the Odessa, Texas, mass shooting Saturday.

If you decided you didn’t need to catch the Democratic presidential candidate’s reactions to the mass shooting, you missed a big missed bleep during his appearance on CNN.

“We’re averaging about 300 mass shootings a year, no other country comes close — so yes, this is f—ed up,” O’Rourke said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“And if we don’t call it out for what it is … then we will continue to have this kind of bloodshed in America,” he said.



Well, clearly this was another in a long line of Beto mistakes when it comes to dropping swear words when you don’t need to. Oh, wait, he used the same language at a campaign event when he found out that the shooting happened?

“Not sure how many gunmen. Not sure how many people have been shot. Don’t know how many people have been killed. The condition of those who have survived. Don’t know what the motivation is, do not yet know the firearms that were used or how they acquired them,” he said at an event in Virginia, according to The Hill.

“But we do know this is f—ed up. We do know that this has to stop in this country. There is no reason that we have to accept this as our fortune, as our future, as our fate,” he said.

I mean, I understand that Beto’s original chosen profession was as the next Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain, but surely he knew that vulgarizing a mass shooting was, well, a bit much.

Do you believe in gun control?

Or not, judging by a new item in the Beto O’Rourke campaign store: a T-shirt with “THIS IS F—ED UP” repeated six times (only the “U” is censored), followed by, “End gun violence now.”

Yes, not only does Beto not mind swearing like a 15-year-old who’s just discovered the issue of gun control and wants to make sure Mom and Dad know it by dropping the F-nuke at the dinner table, he thinks that’s a campaign mantra.

“What we’ve been saying, the rhetoric we’ve been using, the policies and practices and politics in this country has not been as urgent enough as needed. It doesn’t meet this crisis,” O’Rourke said during the stop in Virginia. “So let’s speak clearly and bluntly and take decisive action.”

Repeat it over and over again: Your constitutional rights are screwed up. Your constitutional rights are screwed up. Your constitutional rights are screwed up.

Now, throw a swear word in there and you’ve got a CNN appearance (and a T-shirt).

Related:
Biden's Statement on Wisconsin Christian School Shooting Contains Two Major Problems

Don’t get me wrong here: I’m not reducing Beto’s argument on gun control to a sickening shirt for his campaign. That’s what they’re saying it is.

What is Beto’s argument for balancing gun rights vs. gun control? See the shirt.

What are Beto’s feelings on District of Columbia v. Heller? See the shirt.

What are your thoughts on constitu– I said see. the. shirt.

Beto reduced the El Paso shooting to similarly bite-sized thoughts. Trump was a white supremacist. Guns were bad. He’d do away with both. Vote for Beto.

This is a man whose default management situation is either unfiltered emotion or a prep school version of unfiltered emotion.

What did he say when shooters struck his native El Paso?

“We’ve had a rise in hate crimes every single one of the last three years,” O’Rourke said, “during an administration in which you’ve had a president who’s called Mexicans rapists and criminals, though Mexican immigrants commit crimes at a far lower rate than those who are born here in the country.”

Those statistics, by the way, are false — at least the one about the rise in hate crimes, an aberration that can be traced directly to the number of agencies submitting data. But that didn’t matter to anybody.

Either way, this is pretty pathetic. Plenty of people would be willing to excuse this as not being the candidate’s best moment. O’Rourke is willing to put it on a T-shirt. This is … well, you know the rest of the spiel.

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C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.
C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he's written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).
Birthplace
Morristown, New Jersey
Education
Catholic University of America
Languages Spoken
English, Spanish
Topics of Expertise
American Politics, World Politics, Culture




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