National Review [1]:
Beto is a brainless rich kid who yearned to be cool and wasn’t very good at it. He flunked out of punk. He failed as a fiction writer. He belly-flopped as an alternative-newspaper publisher. And he’s so clueless that his apartment was once robbed while he was sitting in it. At his pricey Virginia prep school (Woodberry Forest School these days carries a sticker price of $48,000 a year), he thought he “just stuck out so badly” because of the “monoculture” there, which the Dallas Morning News called “white, wealthy and southern.” O’Rourke was and is white, wealthy, and southern, so he couldn’t have stuck out much more than Miracle Whip at the mayonnaise convention, yet he was wounded and alienated. Or maybe not. He put this in his high school yearbook: “I’m the angry son. I’m the angry son.” Below that: “I owe you everything, Mom, Dad . . .” You have to pick one, though, don’t you? You can’t be a seething rebel and a dutiful child. You can’t be Kurt Cobain and Kenny G. One pose nullifies the other. Or maybe O’Rourke was even then trying to position himself as acceptable to all constituencies.
That’s just downright brutal. And absolutely correct.
The kind of SmackDown this kid is getting… mostly from Democrats, oddly enough… I would have expected further along the road.
In reading the National Review piece, I am reminded of GK Chesterton who wrote in 1909:
“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then he writes another book in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie, and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble, and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.’ (G.K. Chesterton,Orthodoxy, 1909)
I say with no small amount of irony, the Irish guy with the Spanish surname makes for an absolutely ideal leftist candidate.
South Carolina Liberty seems to feel the same way, saying in part [2];
As with the scarcity of hate crime perpetrators, there is a scarcity of real Democrat candidates to run against Trump in 2020.
So what are the Democrats to do? That’s easy. As with the hate crime scarcity, they have to make one up. They need an empty suit to fill.
That’s where 1/1024th “Beto” comes in. They have a man that knows nothing, has no core beliefs, and has accomplished nothing. He’s the perfect empty suit. Toss in the Green New Deal, tear down this border wall, and the 12 year apocalypse and there you are; A torch bearer for AOC. Chris Mathews gets his leg tingle and we’re off to media’s 2020 races.
Thing is, those that would vote for him, also match the parameters laid out by Chesterton back in 1909. Therefore, he stands no chance whatsoever of making it through the Democrat Party primaries.
The only question remaining is how much are he’ll take out of the room between now and then.