Marco Rubio

Imagine if Rush Limbaugh said this about the two Johns ticket of Kerry and Edwards in 2004.

Randi Rhodes does what she can to make her presence known in that barren wasteland known as liberal radio. Unfortunately, it usually consists of little more than bloviating inanities. (audio clip after page break)

Appearing on Tuesday's NBC Today, political director Chuck Todd warned Mitt Romney against picking Marco Rubio as a vice presidential running mate with a negative comparison to Sarah Palin: "The drawbacks – inexperience. Do you want to pick somebody who basically has the same amount of time in statewide office that a person who was on the ticket last time by the name of Sarah Palin had?"

Todd oddly asserted: "...he's never really been vetted. When you say vetted, his campaign for the Senate, he breezed through. He never had the rough and tumble." In what way did he "breeze through"? Rubio had a long and contentious primary battle with former Florida governor Charlie Crist, who then proceeded to run in the general election as an independent. Rubio had to defeat both Crist and the Democrat to win the seat.

Is the New York Times afraid of white men?

One certainly got that feeling watching Sunday's Meet the Press as guests David Brooks and Helene Cooper both expressed concerns about Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney potentially picking a "white guy" to be his running mate (video follows with transcript and commentary):

NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered newscasts skipped covering tens of thousands protesting abortion in the “March for Life” in January, but on Wednesday night, NPR highlighted a dozen protesters of Sen. Marco Rubio, including illegal aliens.

Reporter Greg Allen began: “In Miami, a dozen young Hispanic men and women gathered outside Senator Rubio's office last week to send a message” that Rubio was "Tea Partino," not Latino:

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:

MSNBC's Martin Bashir on Friday played one heck of a disgusting race card.

In the final segment of the show bearing his name, Bashir made the case without specifically saying it that the Republican Party is too racist for Cuban-American Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) to be its vice presidential candidate (video follows with transcript and commentary):

On Thursday's CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose took issue with Senator Marco Rubio recently attacking President Barack Obama for being 'divisive.' When Rubio tried to point to the President's State of the Union address as an example, Rose interrupted and replied, "I saw him honoring the military of America and a lot other things where we should be coming together. That doesn't seem to be divisive."

The Florida Republican continued by trying to cite the chief executive's use of class warfare as a tactic "What about the part that basically implies...that the only way that some people in America can be better off is for other people to be worse off? And that's not true to our heritage." The CBS anchor, however, cut the potential vice presidential candidate short just 11 seconds after he began his answer, in an apparent rush to get to the local weather reports [audio clip available here; video below the jump].

Despite all the huffing and puffing over Florida Senator Marco Rubio's alleged "embellishing" at the Washington Post, the fact is that his parents were Cuban exiles (meaning number 5 at link: "anyone separated from his or her country or home voluntarily or by force of circumstances"). That fact essentially undercuts everything about the WaPo article except the problem with the opening sentence of the biography at Rubio's Senate web site, which has been corrected.

That didn't stop two Associated Press writers, Brendan Farrington and Laura Wides-Munoz from doing quite a bit of embellishing of their own (a better word would be "mischaracterizing") in an item currently time-stamped early Saturday morning, while pretending that the rebuttal to the Post written by Mark Caputo at the Miami Herald doesn't exist. The AP pair's pathetic prose has two particular howlers which simply must be debunked.

In case you missed it, the Washington Post published a Birther-style hit piece on Thursday accusing Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) of lying about when his parents moved from Cuba to Miami.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews invited the author, Manuel Roig-Franzia, to discuss his allegations on Friday's Hardball, and ended the segment by lauding over his guest, "You ought to get some kind of Pulitzer" (video follows with commentary):

Five Republican presidential candidates are boycotting a proposed debate sponsored by Univision for allegedly trying to "extort" Florida GOP senator Marco Rubio into doing an interview with the Spanish-language network.

Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney have all issued statements saying that Univision must respond directly to charges that it promised to spike a story about a decades-old drug bust involving a relative of Rubio if the senator would appear on its program "Al Punto," a show known for its advocacy for extreme pro-illegal immigration positions.

On Thursday's The Ed Show, MSNBC host Ed Schultz excoriated Senator Marco Rubio and other "damn Republicans" because Rubio recently attacked Schultz and fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow for comments they made about the Florida Republican.

Schultz suggested the Rubio's father might be "ashamed" of him for not accepting the MSNBC host's invitation to come on his show and debate him, claimed that he was "not a true American" for his refusal to debate, and charged that "You're a Tea Partier, and you don't give a damn about" Americans.

Schultz ended up calling Rubio a "damn political phony" and labeled him as "the problem" as he declared that he wishes he could get Rubio defeated:

CBS referenced Vice President Joe Biden's recent gaffe about "fully understanding" China's one-child policy on Friday's Early Show as "off-the-cuff remarks" and "interesting comments," but failed to get to it during the segment. Anchor Chris Wragge merely explained that viewers would find "more on that on our website." Oddly, Wragge and his colleagues did broach the subject in an online video segment.

The anchor, along with co-anchor Erica Hill, brought on political correspondent Jan Crawford to discuss "the busy week in politics" 46 minutes into the 7 am Eastern hour. Besides mentioning the Vice President's "off-the-cuff remarks," Wragge also previewed another subject of the segment, which was Senator Marco Rubio Tuesday save of former First Lady Nancy Reagan, who stumbled while walking with the Florida politician. But even before getting to that, the three first discussed Texas Governor Rick Perry becoming the presumptive front-runner in the race for Republican presidential nomination. After briefly noting Perry's lead in the polls, Crawford decided to zero in on the possible drawbacks to his candidacy and highlighted one of the caricatures of the governor:

On Thursday's The Ed Show, Ed Schultz warned all the senior citizens in his audience to not be charmed by Republican Senator Marco Rubio saving Nancy Reagan from a fall because, according to Schultz, the policies of the "pretty boy" will be "downright ugly."

Teasing his Psycho Talk segment, Schultz told viewers that even though Rubio "got some good press this week for saving Nancy Reagan from a fall" to be wary of him because "when it comes to the rest of the American senior citizens, Rubio wants to leave them high and dry."

(video after the jump)

While both ABC's Good Morning America and CBS's Early Show on Tuesday gave due credit to Senator Marco Rubio for catching former First Lady Nancy Reagan as she tripped at Reagan Library event, NBC's Today strangely avoided making any mention of the Florida Republican being present, even as video footage clearly showed him holding Reagan's arm. [Audio available here; Video follows page break]

Speaking on the floor of the Senate Saturday, Marco Rubio (R-Fl.) said, "If we had a billion dollars for every time I heard the words 'Tea Party extremist,' we could solve this debt problem."

Proving his point about the vitriolic name-calling of conservatives so prevalent now, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman began his most recent piece, "Watching today's Republicans being led around by an extremist Tea Party":

UPDATE AT END OF POST: Headline changed to "Goofy."

The next time one of your liberal friends tells you there isn't any bias in the media, show him or her the following headline published Tuesday by CNN Money's senior writer Jeanne Sahadi.

"Wingnut Debt Ceiling Demands" was actually placed directly above a picture of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and Florida senator Marco Rubio:

In an interview with Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, host David Gregory worried: "There's a purist streak to the Tea Party, right? Don't compromise....As you think about yourself, are you here to legislate? Are you here to compromise?"

Rubio countered: "...we are dealing with major issues in our country, big issues that deserve big solutions....if we don't stand up and say that, who is going to stand up and say that?" Gregory continued to grill the Senator: "But you still have to compromise....you send a statement or you actually compromise and get things done. Which is what Senator Rubio believes in?" Rubio shot back: "To say we just compromised, be, 'Oh, we compromised for the sake of a compromise,' you know, that alone may get you some short-term lauds in the media, but in the long term it didn't accomplish anything."

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., announced Monday that he would not vote for the pending continuing resolution - a stopgap to keep the federal govenrment funded until Congress passes an actual budget. Rubio joins Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and a number of House conservatives, who have decried both the "kick-the-can-down-the-road" approach of the second CR Congress will consider in a matter of weeks, and the apparent inability of congressional Republicans to work their central legislative agenda into the new CR.

Rubio explained his opposition to Mark Levin Monday evening:

Is America a special nation, chosen by God as “the shining city on the hill?” Do our founding documents, with their explicit invocation of natural rights, set us apart from the rest of the world?

Majorities of Americans believe so. Even the liberal Brookings Institution recently published a survey that found 58 percent of citizens believe: “God has granted America a special role in human history.”

American exceptionalism, as it is called, has been in the news quite a lot lately. In his victory speech Nov. 2, Florida Senator-elect Marco Rubio eloquently extolled American exceptionalism, provoking howls of outrage from liberals. “America is the single greatest nation in all of human history. A place without equal in the history of all mankind,” he said. The son of Cuban exiles declared that only in America could he and others have risen so far, with so few barriers to advancement.

So just how good a speaker is the new senator-elect from Florida, Marco Rubio? Conservatives are rightly highly impressed with Rubio's oratory, especially his election night victory speech. However, even liberals are giving high marks to Rubio's speaking abilities. John McWhorter of The New Republic even commits liberal sacrilege by grudgingly admitting (after slamming the speeches of other conservatives) that Rubio is a better speaker than Obama. Of course, this also scares him as well:

Marco Rubio, in his victory speech, was the exception, and showed as he often has why he is the Tea Party’s real secret weapon. Starting out with gushy God talk and closing by stressing that he is a “son of exiles,” Rubio is – let’s face it – a better Obama in his way. His Christianity will always be clear to those who care, and his foreign forebears are ones who fled Communism. At first we were to suppose that Obama’s mongrelism made him “like America,” but the leftist Kenyan business is ripe for the Becks and D’Souzas among us to frame as alien, never mind that Indonesia is a Muslim country. Rubio’s foreignness is more cuddly, immune to Fox News-style demagoguery.

Plus Rubio is a natural talker. No stagy incantations of lines based on things other people said long ago; no giggling; no props; no wandering off topic. He can rub a noun and a verb together, with minimal attendance to notes. As a result, like Bill Clinton, he seems intelligent in a way that Paladino and O’Donnell do not, and approachably human and on the ground in a way that Paul, despite his active mind, cannot.