NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 24: Trump Tower stands on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan on August 24, 2018 in New York City. Following new allegations over hush money that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid to an adult-film actress, the Manhattan district attorneyÕs office in New York City may seek criminal charges against the Trump Organization in the coming days. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images) WASHINGTON - NOVEMBER 08: US Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-VA) remarks on the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the US Capitol November 8, 2006 in Washington, DC. Warner said he supports President George W. Bush's nomination of former CIA Director Robert Gates for Secretary of Defense. Warner said he anticipates Gates' confirmation before the end of the year. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), joined by Senate Assistant Minority Leader John Thune (R-SD) (L) and Senate Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO), speaks following a Senate Republican Policy luncheon at the Russell Senate Office Building on May 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. DALLAS, TEXAS - NOVEMBER 03: U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Beto O'Rourke (D-TX) talks with reporters before addressing a Blockwalk Celebration at Good Records after a day of door-to-door canvassing November 3, 2018 in Dallas, Texas. As Election Day approaches, winning swing votes in the suburbs that surround Dallas and Fort Worth will be crucial in a statewide victory for O'Rourke and his opponent incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) (CNN) — On Sunday, in “celebration” of St. Patrick’s Day, the Republican National Committee tweeted out this: On this St. Paddy's Day, a special message from noted Irishman Robert Francis O'Rourke. pic.twitter.com/JRjMEXhZRY — GOP (@GOP) March 17, 2019 The “joke” is two-fold: 1) Beto O’Rourke was arrested for drunk driving in 1998. The photo used in the tweet above is O’Rourke’s mugshot from that arrest. 2) While O’Rourke goes by “Beto” and many people think he is Hispanic, his full name is Robert Francis O’Rourke and he is Irish (and Welsh). Get it? See, so the RNC takes a shot at Beto’s past arrest AND the fact that he isn’t actually Hispanic. Oh man, that is rich! And by “rich,” I mean classless, not to mention dumb. And unfortunately, those two words have come to define at least some of our politics — most notably among those who remain diehard supporters of President Donald Trump. Here’s what I mean. One of Trump’s most basic appeals in the 2016 campaign — and in the White House — is his rejection of the cult of political correctness. Time and again as a candidate, Trump insisted that the PC police had grown out of control, that regular people were no longer able to say what they thought for fear of being shamed by liberal elites — whether in the Democratic Party, the media, higher education or politics. “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct,” Trump said in a Republican primary debate in 2016. “I’ve been challenged by so many people and I don’t, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time, either.” People really responded to that idea. Many of them felt lost in the rapidly changing culture and hated that they were being told they had to change their long-held beliefs or risk being condemned by some elitists living in New York, Washington or Los Angeles. Trump’s willingness to bully his Republican opponents with taunts about their size or their brain power, his deeply unconventional Twitter feed and even his occasional curse at a campaign rally all played to the growing sense that he wasn’t like other politicians, that he told it like it was. And people liked it. A lot. Then, somewhere along the way – and I can’t trace exactly when this happened so maybe it was always there – Trump’s anti-PC campaign morphed into something uglier, something more insidious and damaging to our politics. What happened is that all behavior – no matter how clearly inappropriate and rightly condemned – began to be seen through the lens of Trump’s war on political correctness. When Trump was found to have said a series of deeply misogynistic things during an “Access Hollywood” taping, his supporters insisted that the freakout over his remarks was simply a function of elitists pushing their PC ideals down everyone’s throat rather than simply just acknowledging that no one should talk like that about women. When Trump said – against all available evidence – that the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the result of bad people on “both sides,” his supporters said the uproar was because liberal elites hated him, rather than simply admitting that he was flat-out wrong in his contention. When Trump has misled and lied – more than 9,000 times, according to the Washington Post’s Fact Checker, his allies have said that the media elites are wrong and that the president is the only one telling the truth rather than just saying that Trump doesn’t tell the truth and that is a bad thing for the country. This St. Patrick’s Day tweet by the RNC is more of the same. Rather than say that it’s tasteless and traffics in ugly stereotype – all Irish people love to get drunk! – the riders of the Trump train instead suggest that anyone offended by it either a) doesn’t get the joke b) can’t take a joke or c) both. The elites love to make fun of other people but when their precious Beto is attacked look what happens! What a bunch of hypocrites! And they don’t even know how to laugh at themselves! The problem with that logic is this: The issues caused by our outrage culture – and fueled by a Twitter-sphere forever searching for things to be offended by – are real. But, the other extreme is even worse – justifying whatever Trump says or does as simply the latest battle in his unending war against political correctness. In that world, anything is cool as long as it bugs the elites.<doc-sep>The Republican Party celebrated St. Patrick’s Day on Sunday by taking a swing at Beto O’Rourke. In an afternoon tweet from the party’s official Twitter account, the GOP plopped a cartoonish leprechaun hat atop O’Rourke’s mug shot from his 1998 arrest for drunken driving and offered a few words of advice: “Please drink responsibly.” Below O’Rourke’s doctored photo, the GOP tweeted, “On this St. Paddy's Day, a special message from noted Irishman Robert Francis O'Rourke." His nickname of "Beto," a common Mexican nickname for people with his first name, has stuck since childhood. That wasn’t the end of it. An hour later, the GOP’s official account called O’Rourke “a failed Member of Congress,” pointing to his voting record in support of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House Speaker, and his vote against the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which, according to the GOP, “added 362,200 jobs to his home state,” among other things. The party's attack on O'Rourke was almost immediately criticized – even by Republicans. Republican strategist John Weaver, who worked on John Kasich's 2016 presidential campaign, called the tweet “vile” and “indicative of the bottom feeding” Republican Party of President Donald Trump and RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. Also via Twitter, Republican Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan wrote, "Do better, @GOP. Be better." One of the newest entrants into the Democratic Party’s crowded field of 2020 presidential candidates, O’Rourke is widely viewed as one of the more charismatic potential challengers to Trump. O’Rourke has already gone head-to-head with Trump, staging a counterdemonstration to the president’s Feb. 11 visit to his hometown of El Paso, Texas. There, Trump called him “a young man who has very little going for himself except he has a great first name.” Upon O’Rourke’s entry into the presidential race, Trump poked fun at his announcement video, telling reporters at the White House: “I think he’s got a lot of hand movement. I said, ‘Is he crazy, or is that just the way he acts?’” In an exclusive interview with the El Paso Times of the USA TODAY Network ahead of his official presidential announcement, O’Rourke made clear his opinion of Trump’s presidency. “I'm not running against, I’m running for. Running for this country. And I’ve always been that way. Everything I do in my life,” O'Rourke said. “There’s no one in this (Democratic) race that I don't think would be a better president than Donald Trump.” O’Rourke rose to national prominence last year during a contentious U.S. Senate race against Republican incumbent Ted Cruz, whom Trump cast aside in his winning 2016 presidential bid. O’Rourke lost by less than 3 percentage points, a stunningly strong finish for a Democrat in the deep red Lone Star State, based on recent polling data. O’Rourke has said his drunken-driving arrest was a “serious mistake.” Police reports said O’Rourke, then 26, was driving drunk in a 75 mph speed zone when he lost control of his vehicle and hit a truck. The charge was dismissed in 1999 after O’Rourke completed a court-recommended DWI program.<doc-sep>“There’s a long, tortured heritage, if you look at the way the Irish were depicted in the 19th century, in newspapers. There, you had depictions of them as rum-loving individuals who were creating havoc in America. To a certain extent, the message about O’Rourke draws on that questionable past,” said Schmuhl, who has studied portrayals of the Irish in America and is the author of the forthcoming book “The Glory and the Burden: The American Presidency from FDR to Trump.”<doc-sep>The Republican National Committee drew outrage for stoking an ethnic stereotype Sunday, tweeting a St. Patrick’s Day message of “please drink responsibly” with a doctored photo of Democratic presidential candidate — and “noted Irishman” — Beto O’Rourke’s 1998 mugshot for a DUI arrest. Speaking in Wisconsin on Sunday, O’Rourke did not address the tweet directly, but spoke in more general terms about the state of political discourse: “We cannot meet this challenge with more partisanship, more pettiness, more meanness, more personal and partisan attacks.”<doc-sep>
Newly minted Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke responded on Sunday to the GOP's Saint Patrick's Day tweet featuring his 1998 mugshot, saying that American voters aren't interested in "personal attacks." During a talk with reporters in Wisconsin, the former Texas Rep. argued that people care more about the bigger picture. "I take from that that people want us focused on the big picture. They want us to be defined not by this pettiness or the personal attacks that we see in ones like the ad that you just described," O'Rourke said. "They wanted us to be defined by our ambitions, our aspirations, the work that we're willing to do to pull this very, deeply-divided country together." O'Rourke then pointed out that no reporters asked him about his decades-old DWI during any of the 20-plus campaign events he has attended over the past three days, nor was he "asked to say something negative about another candidate or someone from another party." . @BetoORourke responds to @GOP St. Patrick’s Day tweet featuring his mug shot “I think people want us focused on the big picture. They want us to be defined not by this pettiness or the personal attacks that we see in ones like the ad that you just described.” pic.twitter.com/AHcyPHWGsm — Johnny Verhovek (@JTHVerhovek) March 17, 2019 The official Republican National Committee (RNC) Twitter account on Sunday published a 1998 mugshot of O'Rourke with a leprechaun hat photoshopped over his head and the words "please drink responsibly" on a placard underneath. "On this St. Paddy's Day, a special message from noted Irishman Robert Francis O'Rourke," the Republican party wrote, alongside the image. O'Rourke has previously discussed getting a DWI more than 20 years ago. At the time, authorities dismissed the charge following his completion of a diversion program. O'Rourke was also arrested in three years before the DWI for hopping a fence on the campus of the University of Texas. He spent the night in custody and was released on bail the next day. "Both incidents were due to poor judgement and I have no excuse for my behavior then," O'Rourke said in August 2017. "I'm grateful for the second chance and believe that we all deserve second chances."