Beto O’Rourke and his magic border beans

OPINION:

Beto O’Rourke — or, as he was born, Robert Francis O’Rourke — tweeted out a video response to President Donald Trump’s border wall speech that in essence said this: There’s nothing to see here, folks. Go home to your families, eat and be merry. The borders are safe, safe, safe.

And then he clapped his hands, spun three times and threw down some magic beans and voila, the borders were indeed safe. Just like that.

Seriously, this is the guy the Democrats are mulling over for the White House in 2020? Well, with talk like this, all the Republicans ought to go: Have at it, Beto boy.

“By any measure,” O’Rourke said, “the border is as safe as it’s ever been.”

Now there’s a mouthful to mull over. Because really, one “measure” might suggest that the borders, for at least eight long years under the previous administration, were pretty danged unsafe. So is he saying that Trump hasn’t stemmed the unsafe flow of illegals crossing into America — which is patently false? Or is he just mumbo-jumboing his way through his remarks, hoping nobody notices his words are empty and don’t make sense?

By any measure, smart money is on the second.

Anyhow, he continued by calling out the president for fear-mongering.

“[T]he president is using fear and anecdote to try to instill an anxiety and paranoia to build the political will to, umm, construct this wall that would cost $30 billion and take private property and cause death and suffering as more asylum seekers are pushed to ever more hostile stretches of U.S.-Mexico border, that, that is what we heard from the Oval Office,” he said.

Good Lord. And here we all thought Trump laid out some pretty decent facts to support the building of the wall — facts like the “humanitarian crisis” at the border that led to an illegal alien “savagely” murdering “in cold blood” a young police officer in California, just a day after Christmas; to an illegal alien raping, murdering and hammering to death an Air Force veteran in California; to an illegal alien in Georgia facing charges for murdering, beheading and dismembering his neighbor; to MS-13 gang members in Maryland who came to America as unaccompanied minors being arrested for the stabbing and beating of a teenage girl.

And so forth. And so on. Or, as O’Rourke might sum it: Yawn.

“And we need to meet that fear with the truth, with our ambition, with the best traditions of this country,” O’Rourke said.

And with magic beans to make the bad go away.

Don’t forget the magic beans.

• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.