Yeah, I was really hoping he would run against Cornyn. I think it’s too early for him to run for President, but I think someone must have convinced him they need him to be somebody’s VP after the primaries.
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Can’t decide whether to be ecstatic or terrified!
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Yeah, I also think this is less about getting top billing and more about getting the veep slot. Which will be even more important if one of the septuagenarians gets the nomination.
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I know people thought Obama’s résumé was thin, but “lost a close race for senator” kind of takes the cake.
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I…
WHY THE $!*#& DIDN’T HE CAMPAIGN ON THIS.
This instantly changes my mind from “eh, he sounds lame” to “I am interested, and I THOUGHT I was already subscribed to your newsletter” territory…
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Veep picks are often about securing votes in their home state. I don’t see Beto being able to do that.
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That wasn’t the case with Biden, really. Democrats tend to be more for choosing a veep who covers the angle the prez is lacking. Biden was the down to earth guy to compliment Obama’s uplifting rhetoric, and Tim Kaine was supposed to be the boring white guy to back up the first woman prez.
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Oh to have robo-flies on the walls of the Anti-Beto teams, especially Republican, as they try to think of ways to use it against him as they grapple with important questions like: “What the hell is the Cult of the Dead Cow??”
The usual solution of fetching a child of five to explain this cyber stuff to them wouldn’t work with the cDc. (Before their time.)
eta: I wonder what the Russian hackers think of this?
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His more conservative positions have drawn fire from Democrats who see him as too friendly with Republicans and corporations. His more progressive votes and punk-rock past helped his recent opponent, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, portray O’Rourke as too radical for socially conservative Texas.
Yep, there’s that… and there’s this…
… he engaged in low-level hacker crimes like toll-fraud (in order to make free long-distance calls to BBSes) and software piracy
Both sides can (and very likely will) spin whatever can be spun from Beto’s ‘gray hat’ past. Some on the left may see his early antics as being harmless and playful, to be excused because, hey!, he’s ‘just like me’. The right will scream ‘black hat’ and ‘larceny’ and wonder loudly why he wasn’t caught long ago.
I’ll have to take a long, long look (as I should anyway) at someone (anyone, really) who pops up urging millions of people to make him the “leader of the free world” while owning a past that included a secretive stint practicing – ahem – playful larceny. And I wonder – if he makes it to the debates – how he’d defend his ‘gray hat’ days, because the instant he says, ‘nobody got hurt’,… well…I’d further wonder what kind of president we’d actually end up with if he made it through.
I so fucking hope the primary gets it right!!!
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They also chose Biden (a Pennsylvania man) because they figured (rightly) that Pennsylvania would deliver them it’s many electoral votes (as it did).
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And his policy positions are generally… ummm… how shall we say… malleable at best.
Hard pass.
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It makes him vulnerable. Remember that Back Orifice was responsible fora lot of rooted windows boxes, back in the day.
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I’m going to be honest, because I also dabbled in phreaking back in the 1980s, as well as trading games for the Apple II and the C64 via sneakernet. So in the eyes of the telcos and the publishers, we were criminals, but we felt we were exposing the price gouging. And our game trading was often a case us pooling our money for an Infocom title, making copies for everyone, so where the publisher saw 5 lost sales out of 6, we saw one sale where none might have happened at all.
So this just makes him human. The more important part is how he himself talks about his past: will he try to play it down, play it up, or just treat it as a piece of a complex puzzle, or what?
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I have yet to finally decide; way too soon.
For me, the only possible indicator to how Beto or others may lead is their history. How did they vote? What laws did they help create? What committees did they serve on and what was their track record? If they received any endorsements, why so? What outside organizations did they take part in? Do they have business interests and – if so – which businesses? Who are they beholden to?
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I agree, but – for me – even more important will be whether or not his explanations amount to bull shit. People who want to be POTUS do tend to fertilize the field.
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The fact that he can use a computer for anything other than Twitter or pr0n earns my vote, if Tinyhands is still the Republican candidate in 2020.
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I’m starting to feel very, very uneasy about him. His record ain’t great except in contrast to Cruz (which would make anyone look like a progressive saint) and he seems to be lurching right/center (whatever) pretty quickly.
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AFAIK the UK telephone network still relied on electromechanical switches until the 1980s.
My GI tract isn’t telling me anything one way or the other about him politically. I doubt he’ll ever be an agent of radical change, but then I doubt Che Guevara would be, if he were elected US president. And nothing could be sillier, at this point, than making confident predictions about how an election will play out.
But in terms of fuckability, he’s hitting it out of the park. There, I said it. Fight me. Anyway, mark my words: if the Democratic ticket ends up as O’Rourke / Buttigieg, AO3 will need to call in FEMA to handle the traffic surge.
I don’t think the cDc deets will affect anything. Fox News won’t be interested since (a) elderly dipshits don’t want to hear about internet stuff, let alone BBS stuff, and (b) hacking has since become more of a far-right Ayn Rand thing. Also, Turmp already picked the clever line of attack, which is that O’Rourke moves his hands too much. His big, manly, skillful hands that make you want his finger on the button, and we all know what button I’m talking about
/drifts into reverie
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