Born to run: Beto's bad-boy bona fides

Texas Democrat Senate candidate Roberto (Beto) O’Rourke seemed to have been forthcoming about his criminal arrests for attempted burglary and DUI. Well, except that he hasn’t. In fact, it would seem that Beto’s mea culpas about his bad-boy behavior failed to include the most damaging information: that according to a witness quoted in the police report, in the immediate aftermath of his serious drunken driving incident, young Beto attempted to flee the scene. That’s right, the current Democratic candidate to represent Texas in the United States Senate, had he been left to his own instincts, might well have been a drunken hit-and-run driver, a type of fleeing felon with which too many Texas voters are extremely familiar and for very good reasons. In a recently released study of hit and run deaths from the American Automobile Association, Texas ranks eighth in the nation, exceeded only by California, Delaware, Arizona, Nevada, Florida, Louisiana, and numero uno, New Mexico. Looking at that list, would you care to hazard a guess what most of those states have in common? If you guessed they’re in our southern tier, proximate to our southern border, that would be a good start, as four of those states do share borders with Mexico, and that is indeed a factor. But it’s a federal government report, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform that gets closer to the truth: that it is the higher numbers of young illegal males in these states operating motor vehicles without either legitimate driver’s licenses or required insurance who account for a disproportionate number of such accidents. Interestingly, FAIR notes that Mexico has no law against leaving the scene of an accident, which could account for some of this statistical evidence, but I’m inclined to believe that geography plays a larger role than culture, especially in the four border states and states like Nevada and Oklahoma where safe haven in Mexico is at most a few hundred miles away for a unlicensed, uninsured, intoxicated illegal who wants to avoid a possible prison sentence for any crime from DUI to vehicular homicide.

So Beto, whose father was a prominent border-area attorney and judge, which could well explain the lack of charges filed in the burglary and the relatively light treatment in the DUI offense, has bad-boy bona fides which could make any Democrat green with envy if he were running for the Senate in some state other than Texas, where news reports and headlines about innocent Texans being killed in hit-and-run accidents with jackrabbiting illegals are too frequent to be scoffed at and swept under urban, liberal, media carpets. It’s hard to imagine that Beto’s Democratic handlers actually believed they could keep a lid on this almost hit and run by their candidate, that it could remain undiscovered when it’s in a police report. Of course, the most intriguing aspect of that account is the phrase, “tried to leave.” DUI is one thing that many voters can forgive, but Hit and Run is a despicable offense, something else entirely, although apparently not with some Democratic kingmakers. You’d think the Ted Cruz campaign could get a copy of that police report.