Alcohol and politics are never a good mix.
Perhaps this was the reason that former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D) threw a childish tantrum in the presence of acting Homeland Security Deputy Director Ken Cuccinelli. The incident took place at The Dubliner, an Irish pub in Washington, D.C.
Cuccinelli recalled the incident in a statement to Fox News.
“I arrived at The Dubliner to meet with some of my Gonzaga classmates last night,” Cuccinelli said. “As I walked up to one of the bars among several in The Dubliner to order my Guinness, I heard screaming and cussing behind me to my left, which I did not immediately take notice of other than the fact it was louder than everything else in the pub.”
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“When I turned to look I saw O’Malley and he was obviously screaming at me. For a moment I thought he was trying to be funny, as we’ve met before, which I thought was strange. It was immediately clear that he was cursing and screaming for real, to the point of veins bulging on his neck.”
The incident brings to mind the words of Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) who, in June of 2018, called for just this type of harassment of Trump administration members.
During a “Keep Families Together” rally at Capitol Hill, Waters told the crowd, “Already you have member of [the] cabinet that are being booed out of restaurants. We have protestors taking up at their house saying, ‘No peace, no sleep. No peace, no sleep.’”
Waters would go on to actually call for obnoxious behavior like O’Malley’s. “If you see anybody from [Trump’s] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and create a crowd. You push back at them. Tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere!”
O’Malley, who ran for the Democrat nomination for president in 2016, seems to have answered Waters’ call to unhinged public behavior. According to Cuccinelli, he even got some of his friends to join in, saying that O’Malley had “also inspired one or two of his (apparent) buddies to join in the cussing assault.”
When Cuccinelli attempted to leave the situation and head to another bar within the pub, O’Malley followed him. “O’Malley pushed his way through the small group to confront me face to face, still cursing me, the president, and my Italian ancestry and he got right up in my face, bumped up against me and invited me to take a swing at him,” Cuccinelli claimed. “At which point I said, ‘Martin, one of us has to rise above this and it’s obviously not going to be you.”
Eventually, the situation was deescalated by a mutual friend, a Democrat according to Cuccinelli, who eventually, “forced some friendly conversation in between Martin and I.”
O’Malley defended his atrocious behavior to the Washington Post.
“We all let [Cuccinelli] know how we felt about him putting refugee immigrant kids in cages — certainly not what we were taught by the Jesuits at Gonzaga,” O’Malley told the Post in a text message. O’Malley then said that Cuccinelli is “the son of immigrant grandparents who cages children for a fascist president.”
The fact that children were also separated under the Obama administration, under whose auspices many of the so-called cages were built, is apparently lost on people like O’Malley. Cuccinelli brought this point up, calling O’Malley’s outburst “odd” owing to the fact that his complaints “applied to President Obama’s policies, a fact he clearly did not appreciate me pointing out (without screaming it, btw.)”
Predictably, many on the Left applauded O’Malley’s boorish behavior.
Lis Smith, an advisor to Democrat candidate Pete Buttigieg, tweeted, “Thanksgiving came early this year.” Smith’s tweet linked to an eyewitness account of O’Malley’s tantrum which claimed that O’Malley forced Cuccinelli from the pub.
Comic book writer Chuck Wendig called for more of this type of behavior from Democrats, tweeting, “Democrats – more of this, please. And less of the ‘we can all just get along let’s just pretend this is business as usual.’”
This type of behavior is, reportedly, nothing new to O’Malley. “Martin’s behavior was as sad as it was shocking,” Cuccinelli said in his statement. “I learned on the other side of the pub that Martin’s screaming was so loud that people on the other side of the pub heard him. I also learned from others who have known Martin for years that while his behavior was shocking, it was not new to them.”
The comic book writer’s call for more of this childish behavior is on the money. When Democrats throw tantrums in public spaces, it shows the American electorate exactly who they are: children who stomp their feet and whine when things don’t go their way.
This type of behavior ultimately doesn’t hurt Trump — it helps him.
Photo of Martin O’Malley: AP Imges
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected].
