… and it was, but the Democrats’ campaign against Mayra Flores took a turn for the absurdly worse. In an attempt to recapture the Hispanic vote in the Rio Grande Valley, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’ campaign decided to go hard after Flores, who won a special election in a neighboring House district that will merge into Gonzalez’. They paid a blogger to run attacks on Flores, who took notice yesterday of the bigoted nature of those attacks.

Gonzales’ paid blogger anointed Flores, the first Latina Republican to win a House seat in Texas, “Miss Frijoles 2022”:

My far left opponent, Vincent Gonzalez, hired a local blogger to run hateful & racist ads against me!

But, I love frijoles & I grew up eating frijoles. I am not embarrassed of my upbringings & frijoles w/tortillas de harina is simply the best. Here's to Miss Frijoles 2022 #TX34 pic.twitter.com/7z5SRGCfUv

— Mayra Flores (@MayraFlores2022) July 18, 2022

Who doesn’t love frijoles? But I digress. This can’t be real, can it? Um … yes it is, NBC News’ Marc Caputo reported this morning:

A Texas blogger paid by Democratic Rep. Vicente Gonzalez’s campaign is attacking Republican opponent Rep. Mayra Flores as “Miss Frijoles” and a “cotton-pickin’ liar,” prompting a wave of denunciations by fellow Democrats.

The language first surfaced three days after Gonzalez’s campaign wrote a $1,200 check to The McHale Report blog June 24 for “advertising services,” according to the Democrat’s Federal Election Commission finance report.

But the blog, which has called Flores “Miss Frijoles” 21 times since then, has not published any Gonzalez ads.

That’s about $60 a serving for the frijoles, which even these days seems pretty inflationary. I do like frijoles, but not that much. Oh wait — that’s the wrong term, my pal Guy Benson points out:

Wow offensive. It’s ‘frijolx’. https://t.co/GxBftqiz83

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) July 19, 2022

Yes, I’m sure this line of attack will convince Hispanic voters to thunder over to the … Republicans. It’s even more toxic than the imposition of the “Latinx” label on Hispanics, who almost unanimously reject it despite Democrats’ insistence on its use. Jill Biden’s “breakfast tacos” comment on diversity came at a UnidosUS “Latinx IncluXion Luncheon,” for which conservative Hispanics had already begun criticizing her. Calling a conservative Hispanic “Miss Frijoles” seems one small step removed from calling Flores a “beaner,” and maybe only a very small step at that.

Gonzalez and his team rushed to distance themselves from their paid blogger, but Jerry McHale refused to apologize or back down:

“Of course, the congressman is against referring to Rep. Flores as ‘Miss Frijoles’ or a ‘cotton-picking liar’,” Gonzalez’s campaign manager, Collin Steele, wrote in a text message to NBC News, echoing the state Democratic Party chair and other Texas Democrats who denounced the language as well.

But McHale would not back down.

“I am a liberal Democrat. And it’s war against the Republican … I’m going to be merciless with her,” he told NBC News.

Gonzalez and his team can try to distance themselves all they want, but they paid McHale before these attacks. They own them now, even if they end up cutting McHale off after the fact. It’s not like they didn’t know what they were getting with McHale, as Texas Democratic strategist Colin Strother told Caputo:

Still, he said, the language in McHale’s blog and Gonzalez’s decision to advertise with him were surprising — Gonzalez last year paid McHale $1,000 for advertising, and the blog is full of posts with racist, crude and bigoted language, like the use of the N-word and derogatory references to women’s private parts, including Flores’ body.

If this is war, as McHale claims, it looks like Gonzales bought a loose cannon that’s more inclined to do friendly-fire damage. Either Gonzales and his team are incompetent, which is a good reason to kick him out of office in November, or they like to pay bigots for cheap-shot attacks on their opponents, which is an even better reason to kick him out of office in November. Either way, Democrats certainly are winning friends in Texas’ border country, right?

In the meantime, pass the frijoles. Sorry, I mean the frijolx.