What do people see in Marco Rubio?

Politics & Elections
1

Full disclaimer: remember a few years ago, there was a woman who hit a homeless man with her car, and he ended up crashing through her windshield with his body half in and half out, and she just kept on driving, parked in her garage, closed the door, and left him there to die on the hood of her car without telling anyone or making any attempt to help him?

As long as that woman is not a Republican, I would vote for her before I would vote for any of the current crop of prospective Republican candidates for President.

That said, I can at least understand what some people see in some of the candidates – semi-successful governorships, staunch support of certain issues, etc. But Rubio completely eludes me.

He lied about his parents fleeing Castro. He’s done nothing significant that I’m aware of, other than making incredibly rapid advancement up the Republican political ladder. He’s flip-flopped on the two of the most important issues, Iraq and immigration. He seems completely out of his depth every time he’s featured as a Republican spokesman, or even on an interview show. Yesterday, after a week of intensive coverage of Jeb Bush’s problems with the Iraq question, he was completely flummoxed by the same question on Fox News Sunday.

So what’s the deal? Is it just because he’s a conservative Hispanic that he keeps being promoted way ahead of his time (Speaker of the House for Florida, then Senator, then Republican spokesman to counter the SOTU, and now top-tier Republican candidate)? Or has he done something amazing that I missed?

2

I genuinely believe Rubio is an intelligent, policy-minded guy. I think he would make a good president and stands a chance of being elected.

Most Republicans probably just see a brown face to win the Hispanic vote.

3

Off to Elections.

4

You could ask the same thing about Gov. Rick Scott.

5

Really? I see a mostly empty suit.

6

So, basically: “If I were President and knew everything we know now, I still might have tried to invade Iraq, but the Democrats in Congress probably would have stopped me”.

Although what’s more pathetic than that answer is that I’m not 100% sure that the Democrats actually would…

7

He’s the candidate of the former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, car dealer Norman Braman. Rubio’s wife works for a Braman “charity”, earning over $54,000 from a “charity” that has given away $250.

8

It still amazes me that even left-wing commentators maintain the fiction that Democrats voted for war, with the same knowledge, or lack of it, that Bush had when he invaded.

It’s complete bullshit. What they voted for was authorization for Bush to invade if, and only if, he certified in writing that all efforts short of war had failed. The idea was to use the THREAT of war to force Iraq to let the UN inspectors back in, to prevent war.

And it worked!!! Iraq let the UN inspectors back in, with virtually no restrictions. They were able to inspect the Presidential palaces. They used helicopters to enable them to go to anywhere in the country with virtually no warning. They used sophisticated methods like ground-penetrating radar to ensure there were no hidden rooms or basements.

And they not only found no WMDs, they found that the CIA estimates of possible WMD sites from satellite photos were a joke. The alleged WMD facilities weren’t just empty, they had clearly been abandoned for years. One alleged chemical weapons factory didn’t even have running water.

So Bush and his cohorts had undeniable proof that the intelligence they had been hyping was wrong, well before the invasion. More importantly, Hans Blix’s last report to the UN said that Iraq was cooperating proactively with the inspectors, and that the remaining discrepancies (mostly lack of documentation of destruction of stockpiles) could be cleared up in a few more months.

Bush didn’t give a shit. He wanted to invade, so he signed a letter to Congress in March 2003 saying that nothing short of war could protect the US. And he continued to hype the discredited intelligence.

No matter what you think about the intelligence he had in 2002, he knew for a fact that he was lying when he signed that letter.

May he burn in hell forever.

9

A way to capture that ever elusive Tiger Beat voting bloc?

10

Wasn’t it either Hillary Clinton or Dianne Feinstein who said they were privy to information about Iraq that the public wasn’t aware of, which is why they voted for the Iraq War Resolution?
Also, were they only listening to the Bush Administration? The information was out there that the Bush Administration wanted to go to war. Ironically, it’s interesting that members of congress at the time, like Joe Biden, voted against going to war with Iraq when Saddam invaded Kuwait, but a decade later voted to give the president the power to invade Iraq before Iraq had even done anything.
That said, I haven’t heard left-wing commentators saying that Democrats had the same knowledge as the Bush Administration. I think I’ve only heard that implied by Jeb and maybe Rubio.

If it were that simple why was there a substantial amount of Democrats who voted *against *the Iraq War Resolution? Why grant him all that power in the first place when it’s usually decided by the congress?
There was also the issue of having the vote right before many members of congress were up for re-election.

I doubt that the Democrats were merely duped by Bush. A lot of it was about politics and securing their political careers, the short term versus the long term.

I’m reading about that at Mother Jones. link

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Your bias is a little off putting. But yeah, I don’t see the appeal of Marco Rubio either. Maybe because he’s a young, clean cut guy who is less unappealing than the Jindals, Gingrichs, and Huckabees to young voters?

I kind of like Rand Paul but I don’t like his views on foreign policy, among other things.

12

Huh? Marco Rubio is as white as the other Republicans. If they see a brown face they should have their vision checked.

Most “Hispanics” in the U.S. don’t identify with white Cubans like Rubio and Cruz, so I don’t know what makes the those Republicans think they can win the Hispanic vote.

13

“Brown face” could just mean Hispanic looking or Hispanic. It’s not necessarily to be taken literally as they are aware of his Hispanic background.

Because it’s just a matter of how you market yourself. It gives them a edge, however slight, over the stereotypical “old, white men” candidates.

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It’s not hard to understand Biden at all, and it’s irrelevant whether anyone had non-public information.

At the time of the vote, there had been no inspectors in Iraq since Clinton pulled them out prior to his air strikes. All we had to go on were satellite photos, informants, and guesses. For whatever reason, the CIA grossly misinterpreted the photos. The informants were paid liars, and the guesses had to err on the side of safety. All of that combined to make it almost mandatory for the President and Congress to threaten Saddam with invasion if he didn’t allow the inspectors back in. I can’t fault anyone for doing that, knowing what we knew in early October of 2002.

But that’s not when Bush invaded. He invaded in late March of 2003, after the UN inspectors had been on the ground in Iraq for four months. Any talk about what anyone knew in October is beside the point, because by March we knew that almost everything Bush had said about Iraq was wrong.

The mistake Congress made was not in assuming the worst about Saddam. Lacking better evidence, they had to do that. The mistake they made was in assuming that Bush had any scruples. They should have made invasion conditional on a second vote of Congress, rather than Bush’s sworn word that invasion was necessary. Because he was perfectly willing to lie to Congress, in writing, in order to invade Iraq.

As I noted in my last post, I believe that the Dems who voted for the resolution did so in the expectation that Saddam would re-admit the inspectors rather than take a chance that Bush wouldn’t invade. They proved to be correct.

And the Dems who voted against the resolution may have done so because they knew that Bush couldn’t be trusted. If so, they also proved to be correct.

Thanks very much for that link. It’s the best compilation I’ve seen to date of the whole mess, but like every other source I’ve seen, it gives very short shrift to the smoking gun, namely Hans Blix’s report to the UN Security Council, almost two weeks before Bush invaded.

http://www.un.org/depts/unmovic/new/pages/security_council_briefings.asp#7

Blix’s report makes it clear that the inspections were working, and working well, and therefore makes it indisputable that Bush’s letter to Congress was a lie.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-1.html

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“Bias” implies that I would not vote for any Republican, and that’s not true (but I concede that it is highly unlikely that a Republican sharing my views would rise very high in that party). My statement was specific to the 20 or so prospective and announced Republican candidates, and was based on their (lack of) merits.

16

My bad.

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He’s pretty. The GOP are in the business of winning elections and selling the access that comes with that. A pretty boy appeals to their idea of marketable desirability. They don’t need a policy wonk; donors can pay some clerk to write the bills.

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They’re not going to fool anyone.