Tempest In A Tea Bag: Marco Rubio’s Traffic Ticket Troubles And Right-Wing Hypocrisy

Posted by Mark NC on June 7, 2015 at 3:43 pm. 3 Comments :

The “liberal” New York Times is taking heat for having published an Internet blurb detailing the rap sheet for the Rubio family on file with the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles. It seems that the senator, and aspiring presidential candidate, and his wife racked up some seventeen tickets for speeding, careless driving, etc. The Times’ item was posted on Friday at a time generally reserved for “news dumps.”

It is unlikely that anyone at the Times regraded the story as an earth shattering bombshell and, absent any assistance from self-serving demagogues, it would probably have rolled off the media radar in half an hour or so. And that’s where the self-serving demagogues come in.

The conservative media regulars snapped to attention and immediately began castigating the Times for having reported a true, albeit trivial story. The effect of their accumulated outrage was to turn an online throwaway into a three day (and counting) event. Participating in the bash-fest were…

Fox News: Bias Alert: NY Times under fire for ‘scoop’ on Rubio traffic citations
Daily Caller: Marco Rubio And His Wife Have Gotten A Bunch Of Traffic Tickets
NewsBusters: NY Times ‘Scoop’ Exposes 17 Traffic Tickets for Marco Rubio
Breitbart: Media: Never Mind Hillary’s Scandals, Let’s Talk About Marco Rubio’s Wife’s Driving Habits
Townhall: Impeach: Rubio and Wife Have Received 17 Traffic Tickets Since 1997
RedState: Breaking: Marco Rubio Does Not Abuse his Influence
National Review: Marco Rubio — Traffic Violations Like Everyone Else
Washington Times: NY Times Goes After Rubio, Wife — For Traffic Tickets

There were, of course, many more, and Fox News has repeated the story numerous times. But perhaps the most offensive contribution to the Times thump-a-thon came from BreitBrat Ben Shapiro, who Tweeted a photo of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s car submerged at Chappaquiddick forty-six years ago. Talk about straying off-topic. Kennedy is not currently a candidate for president and he is, sadly, not here to defend himself. Maybe Shapiro would like to comment on the guy that Laura Bush killed in a tragic car accident. That would be just as relevant. Even more so, since her brother-in-law is running for president and she is around to comment on the matter. [This just in: Greg Gutfeld of Fox News also joked about Kennedy as he dismissed Rubios’s poor driving by saying that “At least he didn’t drive anybody off a bridge.” This even caused his co-hosts on The Five to groan disapprovingly]

Most noticeable in this orchestrated defense of the Rubios, however, is the typical wailing of wingnuts who have been caught doing something wrong. Their first response is always to cry “media bias” and to lament their victimization at the hands of the cold-hearted press. It’s the very same reaction that is currently being deployed by the despicable Duggar family’s defense of their pedophile son Josh. These people think that the media reporting on alleged crimes is worse than the the crime itself.

Unfortunately for them, the facts don’t fit with their fantasy narrative. If the media is demonstrating some sort of bias by reporting Rubio’s traffic tickets, then what were they demonstrating when they reported Barack Obama’s parking tickets back in 2008? As published in a story by the “liberal” Washington Post…

“Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama got more than an education when he attended Harvard Law School in the late 1980s. He also got a healthy stack of parking tickets, most of which he never paid.

“The Illinois Senator shelled out $375 in January _ two weeks before he officially launched his presidential campaign _ to finally pay for 15 outstanding parking tickets and their associated late fees.”

Did any of the usual right-wing suspects noted above come to Obama’s defense and condemn the Post for smearing him? Was there any expressed outrage over how the media resorts to trivialities when there are much bigger problems facing the world? Was there any forgiveness from the right because Obama at the time was a poor student and these were just parking tickets, not moving violations like Rubio’s.

Nope, none of that Christian mercy that conservatives are so fond of flashing was on display. That’s because, they don’t really care about the substance of these issues.

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Instead, they are singularly interested in furthering the spread of their favorite fairy tale that the media is hopelessly liberal and that this unwarranted attack on Rubio is just another example of it. That’s how they can justify stretching this trifling news bite into a multi-day tribulation. It feeds their manufactured stereotype of the media and they will continue to chomp on it until the flavor is gone.

Sunday Funnies: Marco Rubio And Chris Wallace Reenact Iraq Version Of ‘Who’s On First’

Posted by Mark NC on May 17, 2015 at 2:46 pm. 10 Comments :

Last week the nation marveled to the spectacle of Jeb Bush fumbling what must have been the most highly anticipated question that he could possibly have been asked in his nascent campaign for the Republican nomination for president of the United States of America: Knowing what is known now, would you have authorized an invasion of Iraq?

Bush responded that he thought his brother George had made the correct decision given the available intelligence. That, of course, was not the question he was asked. So in the days following the flub, Bush claimed to have misheard the question, but still gave multiple different answers before finally admitting that he would not have ordered an invasion if he knew what he knows now.

For Marco Rubio, that ought to have been an object lesson in tackling this otherwise softball question. But for some reason, the freshman senator managed to do in three minutes what it took Bush five days to do: make an utter ass of himself. In an exchange on the decidedly friendly territory of Fox News Sunday (video below), Rubio engaged in a painfully comical routine with host Chris Wallace wherein he repeatedly failed to grasp the nature of the question he was being asked. Here is just a portion of that train wreck:

WALLACE: Was it a mistake? Was it a mistake to go to war with Iraq?
RUBIO: It’s two different — it wasn’t — I —
WALLACE: I’m asking you to —
RUBIO: Yes, I understand, but that’s not the same question.
WALLACE: But that’s the question I’m asking you. Was it a mistake to go to war?
RUBIO: It was not a mistake for the president to decide to go into Iraq, because at the time, he was told —
WALLACE: I’m not asking you that. I’m asking you —
RUBIO: In hindsight.
WALLACE: Yes.
RUBIO: Well, the world is a better place because Saddam Hussein is not there.
WALLACE: So, was it a mistake or not?
RUBIO: But I wouldn’t characterize it — but I don’t understand the question you’re asking, because the president —
WALLACE: I’m asking you, knowing — as we sit here in 2015 —
RUBIO: No, but that’s not the way presidents — a president cannot make decision on what someone might know in the future.
WALLACE: I understand. But that’s what I’m asking you. Was it a mistake?
RUBIO: It was not a mistake for the president to go into Iraq based on the information he was provided as president.

Well, that clears that up. Is Rubio really that dense or was he he just desperate to avoid criticizing George Bush? Wallace gave him ample opportunity to craft a response that included support for Bush as well as the obvious acknowledgement that no president should invade a country without airtight justification. Rubio kept trying to answer a question that Wallace had not asked, despite Wallace repeatedly restating his actual question. And it isn’t as if this were a surprise, gotcha question (like what magazines do read read?). It is a question that has been in the news for a week.

Why is it so hard for Republicans to concede that wars should not be started unless there are provable threats to our national interest? This sort of obtuse defiance of common sense is what makes people convinced that the GOP is a party of war mongers who will launch into battle on the slightest whim. It reinforces the widespread impression that they are lackeys to the defense industry and others who profit off of war, including those whose profits are political rather than financial.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wallace raised Rubio’s campaign theme of “21st century ideas” and asked him to talk about them. That would ordinarily be a perfect opportunity to drop a campaign ad into an interview. However, Rubio dodged any reference to new ideas saying only that “the balance of power in the world has shifted” because of “autocratic governments in Russia and China” and “rogue states like North Korea and Iran.” Right, because none of them were around in the 20th century.

When Wallace pressed him to reveal his actual new ideas to address those allegedly new problems, Rubio eventually complied saying that “we need to cut [tax] rates” and improve the education system. Those, of course, address only domestic problems that have no bearing on the foreign affairs he had just raised. Not to mention that neither of those “ideas” can be coherently described as “new.”

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

If this is a taste of what Rubio’s campaign will be offering in the coming months, it can be safely assumed that he isn’t going far. But then Bush has already flubbed some of the same questions and the rest of the GOP pack has even less foreign policy experience than these two flounders.

This election cycle promises to be an entertaining romp with plenty of twists and turns. It should be serialized as a reality TV show a la The Amazing (Presidential) Race. I, for one, can’t wait for the debates to see who is voted out of the clown car next.

Fox News Buries Bad News For Ted Cruz And Marco Rubio On Latino Website

Posted by Mark NC on April 23, 2015 at 4:13 pm. 3 Comments :

In October of 2010, Fox News launched the Fox News Latino website in order to mitigate the massive disadvantage Republicans faced with Latino voters. Latinos are the fastest growing demographic in the nation and their voting power is increasing with each election. So even though the Republican Party has been alienating this constituency with blatantly detrimental policies, Fox News was determined to try to save the GOP from its own prejudices.

The Fox News Latino site has been used as the dumping grounds for stories that Fox News was uncomfortable with presenting to their 99% white audience. So it is common to see Fox sequester stories with ethnic themes on the Latino site so they can avoid offending their much larger audience on the Fox News mothership. News Corpse has documented numerous examples of this, and here are just a few.

In another twist on this journalistic fraud, Fox News published an article that exposed Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio as a couple of the Senate’s biggest truants. Despite the fact that they are both in their first terms, they have missed more votes and/or committee hearings than most of their colleagues.

Just today, Cruz gave a venomous condemnation of Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch and the importance of voting against her, then skipped out without voting. [Lynch was confirmed 56 to 43] So it’s interesting that these freshmen senators are currently among the leading candidates for the GOP nomination for president.

Not only are they lacking the most basic qualifications for the job they seek (particularly from the Republican perspective that claimed President Obama was unqualified), but they haven’t even been doing the job that represents their only plausible qualification. What they’ve been doing, of course, is running for president. But maybe they should have acquired some experience first, or at least done some work in their current jobs.

The story revealing the poor attendance records of Cruz and Rubio was prominently displayed on the Fox News Latino web site. However, Fox News didn’t bother to report it either on the air or online. With this strategy Fox can say that they covered the story somewhere, but they don’t wind up giving a great deal of negative exposure that might cause electoral headaches for their Republican pals. Especially those who are favorites of the far-right, Tea Party contingent that makes up most of the Fox audience.

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

There is no valid argument for restricting this story to just the Latino website. While Cruz and Rubio obviously share a heritage that is relevant to the site, their position in a national campaign makes this news relevant to the whole nation. Apparently Fox News doesn’t want the nation to know about this, so it’s downgraded to an ethnic niche site that most of their audience will never see.

Imagine if Fox News had only reported stories about Obama in 2008 on a separate African-American website. What Fox is doing is dishonest and racist. It is a disservice to their audience and a corruption of journalism. In other words, it is business as usual at Fox News.

Marco Rubio Craps All Over Ronald Reagan, The Founding Fathers, And America’s Seniors

Posted by Mark NC on April 14, 2015 at 1:17 am. 16 Comments :

Yesterday marked the entry of the third contender for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. Like the two that preceded him (Ted Cruz and Rand Paul), Marco Rubio hightailed it over to Sean Hannity’s ring-kissing emporium to get the blessing of Fox News. That makes Hannity three for three in getting the first post-announcement interviews from GOP candidates.

In his speech, Rubio reiterated his resume as a son of the sort of immigrants that he would now prohibit from achieving the American Dream. Like all Republicans, now that he has moved higher he would pull the ladder up behind him. But the most prominent theme in his testimonial to himself was the profound revelation that America’s future lies in the future and that the past is behind us. Hmm…makes ya think, huh?

To illustrate this message, Rubio took a rhetorical swipe at old fogies like Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush who represent an ancient, bygone era that holds nothing of value for today’s society:

“Yesterday is over, and we are never going back. We Americans are proud of our history, but our country has always been about the future. Before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. We can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past.”

Some folks may think that Rubio’s admonition that “we are never going back” is the small-minded perspective of someone who cannot imagine technology advancing to the point that time travel becomes possible. Obviously he is not as attuned to the future as he pretends to be.

But what he really fails to comprehend is that, contrary to his assertion that “our country has always been about the future,” it is the opposite that is true. Our country has always been about exalting the past as a romantic adventure filled with glory and heroism. In fact, it is Republicans who have been most adamant about the virtues of the past. They desperately want to return to a time when women and minorities knew their place; when Christianity was the universal faith practiced in every home, school, and government office; when morality was imposed by a vengeful God who hated all the things that patriotic Americans hated.

And Rubio’s futuristic, forward-thinking policies that will thrust America into a new century of world dominance? Small government, lower taxes for the rich, expand military, cut Social Security, ban gay marriage, deny Climate Change, and force prayer into schools and government. All he needs to do is add fight commies and segregate lunch counters and he has a future that looks exactly like 1950.

By condemning “the leaders and ideas of the past” as unable to contribute to America’s next amazing chapter, Rubio is shunting aside the sanctified memory of Ronald Reagan. He is ripping apart the mythology of our Founding Fathers as the creators of everything good about America. He is abandoning the concept of strict constructionism as the defining principle of our laws. Hey, I might vote for this guy.

On the other hand, Rubio’s rejection of the past ought to outrage his fellow Republicans. That is, if they were intellectually capable of grasping the meaning of his repulsive ageism. Not only is he belittling St. Reagan, he is disparaging the most reliable voter constituency in the country – seniors. You have to wonder whether Rubio gave any thought to the notion that, by insulting older Americans as rotting on the vine, no longer having any ideas, leadership skills, or worth, it might cause them to be less than inclined to support his campaign. You see, Rubio’s geezer-bashing not only lands blows on his political foes, but also on everyone of that generation who may take personally his cutting remarks.

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Young Americans (who love being reduced to the demographic stereotype Millenials) are certainly going to be a part of the “new American century,” maybe the biggest part. But so are their parents and grandparents who have most of the experience, wisdom, money, and motivation to vote. It is one thing to run a campaign on fresh ideas and innovation (as if the GOP had any), but it is another thing entirely to malign millions of mature citizens/voters. And Rubio can’t have both his youth-focused theme and his party’s fetish with an idealized past.

CPAC So Far: The Conservative Miscreant Conference Doesn’t Disappoint

Posted by Mark NC on March 15, 2013 at 1:22 pm. 5 Comments :

In the first two days of the Conservative Political Action Conference, the right-wingnut contingent was out in force and was not holding back on their animus and denial. They still believe that the reasons for their losing are related to poor messaging, not poor messages. So even with the highest rated cable news network blasting their propaganda 24/7, and polls showing that the American people overwhelmingly prefer the solutions advanced by Democrats, Republicans continue to cling to ideas that have been soundly rejected by voters.

That is, of course, good news for Democrats and President Obama. The more that rightist stars shine their light on absurdities and overt hatred, the more people will be repulsed and gravitate toward the left. Some examples of the tone-deaf rhetoric emanating from the CPAC ballrooms include these utterances from their heroes:

Donald Trump is very unhappy that the social safety net, that he and the right would love to see unravel, cannot be loosened without sacrificing votes:

Allen West, the guy who says there are 70 card-carrying communists in congress, also thinks that his battle against his ideological opponents on the left is analogous to fighting terrorists.

And Marco Rubio doesn’t want to be perceived as a bigot just because he holds bigoted views:

It is that sort of demented rancor expressed by these GOP Tea-holics that is keeping the party from corralling any support, particularly from minorities and young voters. Yet after throwing such temper tantrums, whose only purpose is to malign their perceived enemies, they persist in the delusion that their policy prescription is fine and it’s just their media, and in some cases their candidate selection, that is flawed.

No matter what they say about their presentation of conservatism, they had a fair shot with “severely conservative” Mitt Romney, and they lost. They had the most powerful name in media at their back, and they lost. The 2012 election pitted Obama against a right-wing onslaught that hit every plank in the far-right platform, and they lost badly. [Note: Although MSNBC and CNN both aired Romney’s CPAC speech live, Fox News ignored it entirely]

CPAC is doing precisely what it was intended to do: Spotlight the cream of the rightist crop. They cannot whine about deficient messaging when this is the all-star roster they themselves put on the field. The only problem that conservatives have is that their ideas are stuck in an archaic past, and they didn’t even work then. When they realize that and begin to adopt sensible policies that the American people favor, they might win back some support. But as things stand today, they are stubbornly holding fast to outdated and unpopular schemes designed to benefit the rich. And judging from the performances at CPAC, they don’t plan to change their grating tune.

Memo To Media: Don’t Cover The Phony Tea Party Response To The State Of The Union

Posted by Mark NC on February 10, 2013 at 10:19 am. 5 Comments :

It was announced last week that GOP Sen. Rand Paul will be giving the “official” Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union address. In previous years it was Herman Cain and Michelle Bachmann (who CNN carried live).

There hasn’t been any indication yet of whether the media will carry Paul’s response live, but it should be noted that to do so would be a total farce. There is no such thing as the Tea Party. It is simply a fringe wing of the Republican Party. Rand Paul is, of course, a Republican. He represents the views of the rest of his party, as well as those of the person giving the official GOP response to the President, Marco Rubio (who is also a Tea Partier).

What this means is that the GOP is trying to get two bites of the post-SOTU apple. The media should not fall for this ruse. Paul was even quoted on CNN as saying that his remarks would not be competing with Rubio’s and would just be “extra.” Therefore, coverage of his comments would only serve to double up the opposition to Obama’s speech.

The Tea Party has recently sunk to new lows in support from the American people. Their caucus in congress is much smaller than that of the Democrats Progressive Caucus (Tea Party, 49; Progressive, 71), despite having more Republicans in the House.

If the media is intent on giving undeserved attention to the Tea Party, fairness would require them to give equal time to a progressive response. Perhaps they could invite Bernie Sanders to respond to the President. He would surely articulate a message that differs from the administration in greater measure than Paul would differ from Rubio. Or maybe they could call on Carolyn Maloney, whose advocacy of reforms for gun safety would be a timely subject.

In any case, it would be unethical for the media to grant an unpopular fringe group the opportunity to propagandize the nation when they already have an official spokesman in Rubio. And if they did so without balancing the coverage by presenting a progressive response it would affirm their right-wing bias. Will the media act unethically? Well, it aint like they haven’t before.

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