I actually sat through Saturday night’s Republican debate-cum-pie fight, and I have to say it wasn’t nearly as infuriating as these things usually get. Which is not to say it wasn’t wholly entertaining, and at times hilarious, as Donald Trump, Jeb! Bush and Ted Cruz (particularly the former two) went after each other like teenagers who stumbled onto The Jerry Springer Show.
Marco Rubio, for his part, was characteristically robotic and vacuous, although at times his internal See-’N-Say seemed like it had been programmed back in 2004 and never updated since. We got this vintage talking point:
I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.
Really? All the time? Meaning, like, this week? In 2016? And of course this all-time comment-board classic:
The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn't kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.
Wow, we’re going all the way back to 2002 now. (Well, OK, 2001; Rush Limbaugh was saying this by 9/18 or so, IIRC.) That See-’N-Say must need a new string. And by the way, has any candidate for President, or for that matter any actual elected official, ever actually said this out loud, in public, on mic, on the record?
But enough about the 2004 See-’N-Say. What struck me the most about Rubio’s performance, and the debate as a whole, was the following vision of America under President Marco Rubio as articulated in his closing statement:
We are going to be a country that says that, "life begins at conception and life is worthy of the protection of our laws." We're going to be a country that says that “marriage is between one man and one woman." We are going to be a country that says, "the Constitution and the rights that it talks about do not come from our president, they come from our creator."
OK; so, let’s break this down. Rubio is basically promising to (1) take reproductive rights and decisions away from women and give them to the state; (2) take marriage rights away from gay people; and (3) take… uhh… I don’t know, actually, what this means. No one thinks, and certainly no one has ever said, that “the Constitution and the rights that it talks about … come from our president[.]” Seriously, WTF does that even mean? Even if he meant to say “our government” instead of “our president”, it still doesn’t make sense. (Then again, neither does the idea of “be[ing] a country that says” things, but we’re not dealing with soaring intellects here.) I’ll guess this is just a variation on his prior public statements about “God’s rules” being the proper and sole basis of American law, and American life.
I don’t know about anyone else, but when I hear a politician promise to take certain civil rights away from certain people, and make “God’s rules” — his God’s rules — the law of the land, that sounds to me like a warning more than anything else. A warning to women, a warning to the LGBT community, and a warning to anyone else who doesn’t believe in his God or particularly care for its “rules.”
Tonight, Marco Rubio warned us what will happen if he becomes President. I fully intend to heed that warning and vote for someone else.