Rep. Eric Swalwell doesn’t seem to know what the words “too soon” mean. Just hours after dozens were killed in Kentucky and several other ...
Rep. Eric Swalwell doesn’t seem to know what the words “too soon” mean. Just hours after dozens were killed in Kentucky and several other states because of tornadoes, the California Democrat used the occasion to remind Twitter that he doesn’t like one of Kentucky’s two Republican senators.
The senator Swalwell used the disaster to slag with was Rand Paul, who tweeted out a message of support Saturday morning for those who died in Kentucky after a series of tornadoes hit the state late Friday and early Saturday.
“Our hearts are broken for all those suffering from last night’s terrible storms,” Paul tweeted.
“I and my team will do all we can to assist local and state officials as they lead the immediate response, and will aggressively help families, businesses, and officials access recovery resources.”
Swalwell, meanwhile, decided it would be good time to use tornado dead — perhaps 80 of them with present estimates, according to CNN — to attack Paul.
“We should do all we can to help our Kentucky neighbors. God be with them — they are hurting,” Swalwell tweeted. “But do not for one second forget that @RandPaul has voted against helping most Americans most times they’re in need.”
This, as you can imagine, didn’t go over swimmingly.
“It’s sad politics have dipped to this level. Genuinely disgusting,” chef and Food Network personality Andrew Gruel tweeted.
The Michigan House GOP’s Andrew Wagner, meanwhile, asked “why are you like this?”
“I’m sure Kentuckians are thinking that now is the perfect time to take political pot-shots,” physician Andy Genova tweeted.
And there were a few people there to remind Swalwell he wasn’t the one to go low:
Fang Fang, or Christine Fang, is an alleged Chinese spy that Swalwell had at least a friendly relationship with — and possibly more. Axios, which broke the story last December, said authorities believed that Fang had sexual relationships with mayors of two Midwestern cities and had acted to cultivate ties with politicians from coast to coast.
At the time, Business Insider reported, Swalwell refused to say whether or not he’d had sex with the alleged spy. And yet, despite the fact he’s on the House Intelligence Committee, Democrats refused to relieve him of his assignment.
That’s not the only reason Swalwell shouldn’t be tweeting about these sorts of things; he has a history of social media missteps, including a 2018 exchange in which he implied that if a conflict broke out in which Americans used their Second Amendment rights to rise up against a tyrannical government, a nuclear weapon could be used against them. (Pointing out the folly in that logic, gun-rights advocate Kyle Kashuv replied that “AR-15s are so dangerous that we must nuke gun owners to confiscate them.”)
This time, it’s not joking around about a nuke, but it’s using a tornado tragedy to try and pillory Sen. Rand Paul. In yet another self-own, the only thing Swalwell did was remind us all how much carbon he’s still wasting.
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