This week, “Beto” O’Rourke announced he’s running for president, and his announcement video was the source of a lot of hilarity. But that’s not the only weird video of him making the rounds this week. Not. By. A. Longshot.
People have been recirculating the bizarre “dental cleaning” live broadcast again, because seriously what the heck? But that’s still not the weirdest one. Not. By. A. Long. SHOT.
Nope, the weirdest one is this one.
That’s the former congressman and loser to Ted Cruz at the microphone there. The guy in the onesie. And sheep head. That’s “Beto.”
He used to be in a band called Foss. That band broke up. But the music bug had ol’ Beto tight, as anyone from Texas can tell you. After all, he performed with Willie Nelson during that failed Senate bid last year. But as Mother Jones wrote in January (h/t Weasel Zippers), those weren’t his only musical forays.
Nearly a decade after Foss split up in the mid-’90s—after he had returned to El Paso, started a web design company, and taken tentative steps toward a career in local politics—O’Rourke and a few friends (including other ex-members of Foss) formed two other bands. One was a rock group called Fragile Gang. The other was a cover band called The Sheeps, which performed punk rock classics. Band members wore a variety of disguises on stage—most notably, tight onesies and sheep masks.
“Our persona was that we were a very famous band from New Zealand and we didn’t want people to know our true identities—that’s why we wore masks,” Ailbhe Cormack, the band’s bassist, tells Mother Jones. “I think people followed along with the mystery of it, but they knew who we were.”
This video is so weird that the NRCC actually sent out a fundraising email labeling him a “furry.”
But while it may be the weirdest video of Beto, it’s not the most damning. That one is probably the clip here where he says he doesn’t just want to stop the wall, he wants to tear down the portions that already exist. Not the weirdest, definitely the worst.
Pretty sad when the video of you in a onesie singing (badly) while wearing a sheep head mask isn’t the worst performance you’ve delivered on camera. I mean dang, dude.