There’s an old political adage that says you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But in the case of Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, perhaps it should be amended to something about governing in perdition, or at the very least purgatory.

The Texas Senator known for comments featuring often wildly off-the-mark or demonstrably false information landed a career best this week when he tried to pull off a political Triple Lindy by linking Pres. Biden to both Satan and beloved 1980s rocker Pat Benatar.

The statement in question came during a sit-down with the Joe Pags on his syndicated show on Thursday, during which Cruz was asked a wonky question about whether a congressional supermajority would ever vote to remove Biden from office in case of an impeachment.

“I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict,” Cruz said. Setting aside for a moment the ongoing right-wing fantasy in which democrats commune with Beelezebub to drink the blood of the young, as usual, Twitter piled on Cruz for his lyrical malapropism, in which he seemingly misunderstood the subject of one of Benatar’s most beloved hits.

“There are so many black metal bands Ted Cruz could have used here, and yet his idea of satanic music is… Pat Benatar,” one user commented about Cruz’s Benatar bungle, which appeared to suggest that the singer’s urgent 1980 single “Hell Is For Children” is somehow about Satan worship and not, as is actually the case, about child abuse.

“He was probably thinking of ‘Hell Is For children,’ which, if he’d actually listened to the song, is anti-child abuse. But who cares about facts?,” wrote another. “I’m still thinking about this. Ted Cruz graduated high school in 1988. Pat Benatar released albums consistently from 1979 throughout the ’80s,” wrote author Ali Davis. “And apparently the WHOLE TIME, Young Ted was building up resentments to those hard-rock, murderous, Benatar-listening hooligans.”

Check out the tweets below.