Hey look,
the Republican primaries have started.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio isn’t mincing words when it comes to his Republican colleague Sen. Rand Paul’s support for the U.S.’s new Cuba policy.
“Like many people who have been opining, he has no idea what he’s talking about,” Rubio said Thursday on Fox News’ “The Kelly Report.”
For those of you who were wondering, Rand Paul noted that a half-century of embargo "doesn't seem to be working," and he's not allowed to say that because Sen. Mitch McConnell told Marco Rubio that he could be in charge of saying things about Cuba and Rand Paul is not Marco Rubio so therefore he's stupid and wrong and an example of all the world's ills, when it comes to people pointing out 50-year-old things that don't seem to be working. All three of these men are members of the U.S. Senate, after all, so they spend most of their days with fellow 50-year-old things that don't seem to be working.
Rubio pushed back on Paul’s claim, saying, “I would expect that people would understand that if they just took a moment to analyze that, they would realize that the embargo is not what’s hurting the Cuban people, it’s the lack of freedom and the lack of competent leaders.”
And we would
all love competent leaders, but for most of us that's simply not in the cards. Whether you live in Cuba or in Texas or in a major Canadian city managed by an unrepentant crack fiend,
competent leaders are in short supply. If we base all our policies around who does or does not have
competent leaders, we wouldn't be on speaking terms with any nation on earth and New Hampshire would cease to exist. There are likewise a great number of nations that are notoriously sketchy in their concepts of freedom, and we invite their leaders to the White House and shake their hands and sign trade deals with them whenever we can manage it. Continuing the embargo because "freedom" is a slogan, not a policy. Like the people who insisted we invade Iraq for "freedom" but said nothing about invading North Korea for the same reason, you're going to have to do a little better there.
Hastily assembled banalities don't cut it.
This would be an exceptionally fine time for Rubio and his fellow Republicans to articulate an alternative policy, something based on logic and rational arguments, about how they would deal with Cuba that would lead to any better result. They could do the same on immigration policy, or on any one of a dozen other things—it would all be welcome. Instead we get "leadership" from would-be presidents like Marco Rubio that consists of saying the exact same things his movement was saying back before Marco Rubio's young mind understood object permanence, and that is not a policy. That is just a speech.
Update: And like our great statesmen before him, Sen. Paul takes to Twitter for his responses:
Hey @marcorubio if the embargo doesn't hurt Cuba, why do you want to keep it?
— @SenRandPaul
Senator @marcorubio is acting like an isolationist who wants to retreat to our borders and perhaps build a moat. I reject this isolationism.
— @SenRandPaul
There ya go. It's like Lincoln-Douglas, if their debates were restricted to throwing pine cones at each other.