Republican Senator Comes at Patton Oswalt For Offensive Tweets and it Goes How You'd Expect

A 67-year-old Texas Senator has gone to war with professional comedian on Twitter... and it's about as fair a fight as you'd imagine.

John Cornyn picked the ill-advised scrap against Patton Oswalt because he endorsed his Democratic political opponent MJ Hegar, who on Tuesday launched her Senate campaign to unseat him after 18 years.

The 43-year-old Afghanistan war vet helicopter pilot, who sued the Air Force for banning women from combat, hopes to become the first Democrat to claim a Texan seat since 1994.

Just hours after officially announcing her campaign, Cornyn came out swinging at "Hollywood Hegar", and hit her where it hurt: pointing out that Oswalt had previously used swear words in tweets.

"Hollywood Hegar supporter and video guest star, Patton Oswalt, has tweeted some offensive comments over the years, reply A or B to let us know which one is more offensive to you," Corbyn posted, offering screenshots of a pair of Oswalt's jokes from 2013/2014, albeit with all the swearwords carefully redacted.

Corbyn — or whoever is in charge of his official @TeamCornyn campaign account — then combed through all of Oswalt's old tweets, highlighting any that contained a curseword, such as the one about the "bedazzled dil-- that was firmly in Marilyn Manson's pooper" or the one about Anthony Weiner's "d--- pic with the nuclear codes written on his c--- shaft".

Oswalt patiently explained: "If you're wondering why I'm being gummed by @TeamCornyn, it's because I'm in this ad for the extraordinary @mjhegar. @JohnCornyn is scared shitless -- he won't even debate her -- so this is the straw he's grasping at. Good luck, Pop-Pop!"

But Cornyn kept digging. "Hollywood Hegar & Vulgar Patton. The dynamic duo," Corbyn slammed, even asterisking the words "vagina" and "scrotum", prompting the reply from Oswalt himself: "Do you also bleep out "appendix" and "kidney"?

The Ratatouille star's followers could not get enough of the exchange; many wondered if Corbyn was at risk of breaking the record for worst "ratio". In Twitter lore, a comments:retweets/likes ratio of 2:1 or more is a bad sign.

Cornyn's first tweet aimed at Oswalt got 58 retweets, and more than 6,100 comments... a ratio of 105:1.

Many of Patton's fans thanked Cornyn for bringing attention to Hegar — whom they had not been unaware of — with some claiming to have made donations to her campaign as a result.