Twitter briefly shut down a parody account of former Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke’s meandering blog posts -- apparently for too closely impersonating the former congressman.
O’Rourke, who became something of a media darling as he tried unsuccessfully to defeat Sen. Ted Cruz last year, is mulling a 2020 presidential run.
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Before he makes a decision, though, he has set out on a road trip through locales in Kansas, Texas and New Mexico, taking to Medium to pen his thoughts in a Kerouacian style as he tries to wrestle his way out of a self-described "funk."
“Maybe if I get moving, on the road, meet people, learn about what’s going on where they live, have some adventure, go where I don’t know and I’m not known, it’ll clear my head, reset, I’ll think new thoughts, break out of the loops I’ve been stuck in,” he wrote.
He mentioned a number of times not only what he was eating, but also how he is recognized in various places.
“Drove to Dalhart. Ate at the Grill. Was last there in August of 2017. Green chile cheeseburger. The table over asked if I was Beto,” he recalled.
The blogs quickly drew mockery from conservatives, with National Review’s Rich Lowry asking “Is Beto Doing OK?” It didn't take long before the spoof @BetosBlog emerged on Twitter and took it a step further, posting regular snippets echoing Beto’s blog style.
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“Driving outside of town I nodded to the cows. Thank you. We all have our role to play,” one satirical post read.
But on Wednesday, it was gone, first drawn attention to by popular conservative wag @comfortablysmug, who claimed to have been in contact with the user who ran the site, and published the email exchange.
According to the account, the user was banned for impersonation. However, by Wednesday evening, the account re-appeared under the name @BetosFakeBog and named "Not Beto's Journal" -- more clearly identifying itself as a parody account.
The account is one of a number of parody accounts floating around Twitter. President Trump has a number of parodies, both of people pretending to be him and people churning out satirical spins on his tweets -- such as “Emperor Trumpatine” who tweets Trump’s tweets in the style of Star Wars villain Emperor Palpatine.
An O'Rourke spokesman did not immediately return a request for comment..
The blog isn’t the first curiosity to come from O’Rourke. Earlier this month he bizarrely posted parts of his visit to a dentist on Instagram.
With dental tools jammed into either side of his mouth, O’Rourke introduced his dental hygienist as part of his Instagram story “series” on “people of the border.”
“Um, so I’m here at the dentist and we’re going to continue our series on the people of the border. I’m here with Diana, my dental hygienist,” O’Rourke slurred. “Um, Diana is going to tell us a little bit about growing up in El Paso.”
Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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