Rubio's Big Moment

Pulling a Rubio

The state of the Union speech was given last night by . . .  hmmm, that seems to have slipped my mind somehow.  At any rate, Marco Rubio dominated the evening with his boo-boo. It was an eternal moment. Four hundred years years from now people will still be saying “don’t pull a Rubio”.   By then that comment will be attributed to either the Bible or Shakespeare .  It wasn’t the sip of water that Rubio took that made that moment eternal. No indeed, people do that all the time, many accomplished speakers sip water while talking.  What made that moment remarkable was the furtive look on Rubio’s face before he did the action, and the look he gave when he reached for that thing that was out of sight, like he was used to sneaking things around, and reaching for unseen things.   That sneaky action seemed right at home in his character, like hoping his parents wouldn't notice, a very basic part of the Rubio moral structure, including his reaction when he knew he had been found out, easily sliding into a practiced air of pretentiousness.

And there was more. He wiped perspiration from his face four or five times and he also had Nixon’s famous 5 o’clock shadow.  He also talked about how bad government was, about how it did so many things wrong.  Then he talked about how much the Rubio family had profited from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security  and his own education grants.  We might get the impression that government had done its duty and now it needed to go away before it could help some other people who might become parasites on the nation.  

I watched to the end, hoping to find out why he was one of the 22 senators who had voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.  I hate to say this, but I was disappointed.