Rubio walks on water

Well yes, Marco Rubio's lunge and glug for the water in the middle of his official GOP response to President Obama's SOTU was hilariously bizarre. A made for internet meme moment. Everybody's talking about it. It sent CNN over the edge.



Not a photoshop. (Imagining Ted Turner looking at that chyron and shooting his TV).

Hell, that awkward moment was a lifesaver for Rubio's career. The Great Hispanic Hope of the GOP, who's going to win over the Democratic party's base because he knows who Tupac is, clearly understands the internets. The speech was awful but he handled the fallout brilliantly. He won the insiders over with a rapid response, self-effacing tweet that amused the political obsessives who build the news cycle narratives. Then he played out the "aw shucks" routine when he made the rounds on the TV talkies today.

So everybody chuckling over his funny little mishap. Almost nobody talking about how what Rubio said was so incredibly deceitful at best or at worst, dangerously unhinged from reality. For instance his "working class" residency. From the speech:

Mr. President, I still live in the same working class neighborhood I grew up in. My neighbors aren't millionaires. They're retirees who depend on Social Security and Medicare. They're workers who have to get up early tomorrow morning and go to work to pay the bills. They're immigrants, who came here because they were stuck in poverty in countries where the government dominated the economy.

Rubio's humble abode is on the market at an asking price of $675,000. And do click through that link to see how Rubio benefited from the housing bubble, which in his speech he blamed on longstanding false GOP tropes.

Steve Benen shortens the rest of Rubio's inanity:

By any sensible measure, Rubio's entire pitch was incoherent gibberish. He thinks President Obama is hostile to free enterprise and wants to increase the deficit, neither of which makes any sense. Rubio thinks the housing crisis was caused by big government, which is simply idiotic. Rubio celebrates his family's history of dependence on government social programs like student loans and Medicare, while articulating a policy agenda that guts government social programs like student loans and Medicare.

Forget ideology, subjectivity, and areas of opinion -- the fact is Marco Rubio's speech was filled with a series of claims with no meaningful connection to reality. The senator even thinks combating the climate crisis means asking government to "control the weather," which is just genuinely dumb.

I feel reasonably certain you will not be hearing this on CNN tonight. Or ever. Nor on any other of the major televised broadcasts. Which is why your conservative relatives actually believe those viral emails they keep sending you.