There’s partisan pandering and there’s the self-serving screed. Then there is RubioSpeak.
No, we’re not talking about carefully parsed, revisionist references to government stimulus that makes Charlie Crist look like a straight-shooter. No, we’re talking about Marco Rubio’s recent rhetoric that was a new low – even for calculated, conservative, Cuban-American politicians.
“My parents lost their country to a government,” said Rubio, the Tea Party poster lad who’s running for the U.S. Senate seat that Gov. Crist thought was reserved for him. “I will not lose mine to a government.”
How outrageous that he would analogize the Communist Castro dictatorship to contemporary American governance. Why not just stick with basic GOP talking points and “socialism” slams? As if the incumbent administration believed in government ownership of the means of production. Frankly, Rubio’s political cheap shot is not unlike comparing George W. Bush to Fulgencio Batista. It’s rhetorically repugnant and ideologically obscene.
But if Rubio truly wants a relevant — and ironic — analogy to what his parents faced, then he need look no farther than his own, South Florida back yard. That’s where, for two generations, those who dared to exercise their freedom of speech to speak against the Cuban embargo and in favor of unfettered travel to Cuba have been routinely intimidated and smeared – and worse. Where the prevailing ideology was a hybrid of vendetta and right-wing extremism. Arguably, that would have been the place to start before moving on to fix Washington.