Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke isn’t just a contender with a thin record and a thinner resumé.
Nor is he just a man with criminal past, including arrests for drunk driving and burglary.
In his salad days, he was an odd bird who wrote some disturbing things when he belonged to a group of computer hackers.
“Butt-Shine” Needed
O’Rourke, who announced his candidacy on Thursday with the usual progressive bromides, comes off as a clean-cut Kennedyesque figure who, the left hopes, will be the next Barack Obama.
It would help if O’Rourke were black, but in any event, his younger days were anything but conventional. He didn’t belong to a “choom gang,” like Obama, but he did join “the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history,” Reuters reported on Friday.
The Cult of the Dead Cow, “jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows,” Reuters reported. “It’s also known for inventing the word ‘hacktivism’ to describe human-rights-driven security work.”
Hacking a computer one does not own just happens to be crimes, but forgetting that, Reuters and The Daily Caller dug up some disturbing material that O’Rourke wrote when he toiled for the group.
One of the least disturbing was a hopeless attempt at poetry in 1988, “The Song Of The Cow,” The DC revealed:
I need a butt-shine,
Right now
You are holy,
Oh, sacred Cow
I thirst for you,
Provide Milk.
Buff my b***s,
Love the Cow,
Good fortune for those that do.
Love me, breathe my feet,
The Cow has risen.
Wax my a**,
Scrub my b***s.
The Cow has risen,
Provide Milk.
Robert Frost’s position in the pantheon of poets is safe.
In 1987, O’Rourke proposed abolishing money, Reuters reported. The young economics guru wrote that he would “slowly take the United States off the world market, and then slowly phase out our own money markets (including Wall Street). This would slowly bring the upper and middle classes of people in America together. By the time money is de-emphasized enough that it is used only for trading with foreign nations, almost all the classes of people in America would be (for all intended purposes) even.”
But those childish utterings are nothing like this strange fantasy:
Then one day, as I was driving home from work, I noticed two children crossing the street. They were happy, happy to be free from their troubles. I knew, however, that this happiness and sense of freedom were much too overwhelming for them. This happiness was mine by right. I had earned it in my dreams. As I neared the young ones, I put all my weight on my right foot, keeping the accelerator pedal on the floor until I heard the crashing of the two children on the hood, and then the sharp cry of pain from one of the two. I was so fascinated for a moment, that when after I had stopped my vehicle, I just sat in a daze, sweet visions filling my head. My dream was abruptly ended when I heard a loud banging on the front window. It was an old man, who was using his cane to awaken me. He might have been a witness to my act of love. I was not sure, nor did I care. It was simply ecstasy. As I drove home, I envisioned myself committing more of these “acts of love,” and after a while, I had no trouble carrying them out.
O’Rourke’s pseudonym? Psychedelic Warlord.
Criminal History
Those weird writings aren’t the candidate’s only problems.
In 1998 when he was 26, the Houston Chronicle reported, police arrested him for drunk driving after he lost control of his car on a interstate highway and hit a truck. The crash sent his car across the median. O’Rourke blew 0.136 and 0.134 on the breathalzyer, the newspaper reported, a number that exceeded the legal limit of 0.1. And a witness told cops he tried to flee. “He was arrested at the scene and charged with DWI,” the Chronicle reported, “but completed a court-approved diversion program and had the charges dismissed.”
In 1995, cops also collared him a on a misdemeanor burglary charge, but once again O’Rourke waltzed away.
O’Rourke’s father was a wealthy and influential county politician and judge.
