By Dave Andrusko

Photo: jstreetdotorg
It was just last Thursday that pro-abortion former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke announced he was running for President. In just five days, he has (a) made statements about abortion that reveal just how out of touch he is with Americans, including positions at odds with most ordinary Democrats; (b) had stories written about his past that make you wonder how tightly strung he is; and (c) caused questions to be raised about a reporter’s coverage of him that put that reporter’s credibility at risk.
All this culminated (as we wrote earlier today) with a full-throated, no excuse embrace of third-trimester abortion, initially touched on Monday in Cleveland and fleshed out today at Penn State University.
To double back, in an amazing display of journalist legerdemain, a reporter for Reuters had kept “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group” a secret until after O’Rourke had campaigned unsuccessfully against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018. The reporter, Joseph Menn, had been aware of O’Rourke’s membership since 2017.
In an excerpt from a forthcoming book that appeared in Reuters the day after O’Rourke’s announcement, Menn revealed that as a teenager O’Rourke was a member of
The hugely influential 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. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.
{A less benign description is that “The group is responsible for a variety of shady activity like stealing credit card numbers to pay for long-distance telephone service, violating copyright laws and hacking into computers…”}
There were many eye-opening revelations but for our purposes there is what Menn described (in the understatement of the year) as “a short and disturbing piece of fiction” that O’Rourke wrote when he was 15.
“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…. 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.”
None of this, of course, will make any difference to the talk show hosts and websites whose allegiance to the Democratic Party is unbreakable. There have been sympathetic stories about how poor little Beto is being persecuted for his bizarre musings as a teenager. And, of course, being on the “right” side of abortion—abortion on demand throughout all 40 weeks of pregnancy—is now not only a badge of honor among national Democrats but also a requirement for admission into that exclusive club of viable presidential candidates.
