Marco Rubio Wins CPAC VP Straw Poll Day After MSNBC's Bashir Implied GOP Too Racist To Promote Him

Talk about your delicious instant karma.

Roughly 24 hours after MSNBC's Martin Bashir strongly implied Republicans were too racist to make Cuban-American Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) their vice presidential nominee, the Florida senator overwhelmingly won the CPAC straw poll for that position on the ticket:

As you can see, Rubio secured 34 percent of the votes with his nearest competitors, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, tying for a distant second at only nine percent.

Yet the previous day, Bashir pompously said:

MARTIN BASHIR: Well done, Mr. Rubio, but don't be deceived by the applause because you're going to have to go an awful lot further if you want to be on this Republican ticket as vice president.

Mr. Rubio has already displayed some flare in rewriting his personal history for the sake of political progress. You may remember that in his official biography, he said that his parents came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover. If this were true, it would clearly add grit to Mr. Rubio’s compelling life story, fleeing a communist dictator for the freedom and true liberty offered by the United States. But unfortunately, official documents suggest that Mr. Rubio’s parents left Cuba more than two and a half years before Castro took power in 1959.

And just two years ago, in fact at CPAC 2010, Mr. Rubio described how his father left Cuba after suffering many hardships, including the loss of his mother when he was just six years old. But just seven months later, Mr. Rubio said that his father lost his mother when he was just shy of his ninth birthday.

Now, I'm not picking fights over tiny details, but it does reveal the enormous challenge that confronts this young politician who wants to make progress in a party that says multiculturalism is dead. He's already had to embellish his personal history. One wonders what else he'll have to do to make himself acceptable to perhaps the most selective incarnation of the Republican Party that we’ve seen in a very, very long time.

For this, Bashir wins this week's "Try Thinking Before You Open Your Mouth Award."

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