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| Marco Rubio: Moving Target |
Back in 2012, Curmie, though he disagreed with you far more often than not, allowed for the
possibility that, unlike virtually all other leading Republicans, you just might
be “both sane and intelligent.” When you
were seeking the GOP nomination for President in 2016, you accurately described
Donald Trump as a “conman” who has “spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy,” and whose
rhetoric is reminiscent of “third-world strongmen.” You said that you’d promised to support the
Republican nominee in 2016, but “it’s getting harder every day.”
But then you didn’t get the nomination; Trump did. And, choosing expediency over integrity, you
re-invented yourself as a MAGA flag-bearer.
After casually breaking your promise to return to private life if you
didn’t get the presidential nomination, you had a pretty easy life, cruising to
re-election in both 2016 and 2022. You could
almost certainly could have continued in the Senate for another couple of
decades at the very least: a sort of Mitch McConnell without even having to be
quite as actively evil.
For reasons Curmie fails to understand, however, you chose
to trade that comfortable future, along with the last vestiges of your self-respect,
to align yourself with Dear Leader, a feckless buffoon who is the perfect storm
of ignorance, xenophobia, malevolence, prevarication, and hubris. To be fair, you were far from the worst
cabinet-level appointment: with Bondi, Gabbard, and Noem now gone, that dubious
distinction is pretty much down to two combatants: Robert Kennedy Jr. and Pete
Hegseth, neither of whom is remotely qualified to work for, let alone head,
their respective agencies.
Unfortunately, those years you’d spent on the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee may have been more of a hindrance than an asset when you
were expected to carry out the orders of an incompetent narcissist. You knew that what he wanted in terms of
policy was idiotic and what he wanted from you wasn’t your experience, much
less any claim to expertise. He wanted
yet another yes-man, someone to tell him his every absurd utterance was the
stuff of brilliance. He didn’t want an
advisor; he wanted a minion.
So, there you were, embarrassing yourself on an almost daily
basis: you were left trying to justify this administration’s serious violations
of international law, its inane and vacillating tariff policies, and the
not-so-veiled threats against some of our nation’s staunchest allies. You came off like a cringing houseplant in
that White House meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy because, no doubt, that’s
what you were told to do. You knew
better, but you couldn’t seem to muster even the modest amount of courage it
would take to rein in 47’s pompous and puerile bluster.
And what did you achieve by all the bowing and
scraping? Certainly not loyalty; that’s
a one-way street in Trumpistan. Dear
Leader expects servile fidelity to him rather than to the Constitution or the
citizenry, from everyone around him. But
reciprocating that allegiance? Who are
you kidding? The Trump administration is
nothing if not an organized crime syndicate; you can’t go a week without
reading of another case of favors granted in return for… erm… financial largesse
(generally in seven figures). On rare
occasions, criminals will get pardons or commutations if doing so either helps
47 politically or is so outrageous that it demonstrates his power. Usually, though, it’s just a monetary bribe,
and Rubio’s net worth is barely over $1 million: nowhere near enough, in other
words.
Any normal person with even a below-average ability to read
people and the slightest touch of self-preservation would have avoided the
Trump administration like the proverbial plague. Marco Rubio may say and do profoundly stupid
things on a regular basis, but, unlike his boss, he’s not a blithering
idiot. He knew better than to trust Dear
Leader, but he did so, anyway.
The one-sidedness of that relationship was never more
obvious than in the Colossal Catering Container Caper. Details are sketchy and sometimes
contradictory, but a few things seem to be pretty clear. After the NATO summit in Ankara, Türkiye last
month, there was apparently reason to believe that there might be an attempt on
Trump’s life by the Iranians. Remember
them, Gentle Reader? The folks whose
military capabilities have been utterly annihilated so many times in recent
weeks that Curmie has long since lost count?
Oh, and the intelligence report about the potential attack
came not from the US military or the CIA, who perceived only the usual bellicosity
and were skeptical of the information, but from Israel, who certainly would
have no reason to increase the tensions between Iran and the Trump
administration, right? 😉 Still, an abundance of caution in such
matters is reasonable, and Curmie is not going to criticize the extra
protection in general terms. The
specifics are another matter. We’ll get
there in a moment.
Exactly why it was decided that Trump should not be on board
Air Force One is unclear: there are conflicting reports about the plane’s defenses. What we do know is that the President was
sneaked off that plane and taken via catering container to a nearby military
jet on which he and a handful of other people left the country.
And then Air Force One took off, with dozens of staffers and
journalists on board! Had there actually
been an attack, then those people would surely have perished. Here’s the take of Joe Lockhart,
who served as White House press secretary to President Clinton during their 2000
trip to Islamabad: “They just didn’t seem to give a second thought to anybody
but the president and the few people who were with him. We went out of our way to make sure the
maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human
shields. They didn’t even think about it. And to me, that’s the big
difference.”
It’s reasonable to assume that the misdirection was initiated
by the Secret Service or the military or whoever, but at the very least, Dear
Leader must have signed off on the plan.
It certainly fits with everything we know about his personality.
No particularly strenuous mental calisthenics are required
to imagine that 47 would relish the idea of sacrificing the press corps,
especially those who had the audacity to ask pertinent questions he couldn’t
answer without telling an obvious lie.
He saw nothing wrong with sending American servicemen and -women into
harm’s way in a war of choice he started because Bibi Netanhayu told him to,
with bombing Iranian schoolgirls and Venezuelan fishermen, with shooting Renee
Good and Alex Pretti (among others), with canceling US-Aid programs that would
have saved literally millions of lives, with… well, you can recite the litany
as easily as Curmie can, Gentle Reader. So
why would he care about journalists, or his own staffers, for that matter? Yeah, he’d probably miss Stephen Miller, but all
things considered it sounded like a good deal.
Of course, the stratagem has its defenders: anything to
protect the President, and all that. Curmie
has no issue with the deception, but there’s an easy way to avoid putting all
those other people at risk. Start with
exactly what happened: sneaking Trump away from Air Force One. Wait until that military plane has taken off
and the President is out of danger.
Announce that there was an issue with Air Force One and it would remain
on the ground until that situation was fixed, but it was important that Trump depart
as quickly as possible (make up a reason), so he was taken to a military jet
and is already in the air (or in the UK, as the case may be). The target was specifically Trump,
apparently, so there’s no apparent threat to the passengers still on what
ultimately became the decoy plane. Boom
(or, actually, no boom): problem solved.
Curmie does not fancy himself a strategic genius, but the
solution does seem pretty obvious. If
you’re going to lie, anyway, at least do it in a way that achieves your primary
objective while also reducing the risk to dozens of other people. Duh.
All of this leads us back to Marco Rubio. There’s a lot of chatter of late about Karoline
Leavitt (Bullshit Barbie) leaving her position as Press Secretary the day after
finding out that she was one of those that Dear Leader would be perfectly
willing to sacrifice for his own safety.
But other than her rather impressive ability to tell outrageous lies
without flinching, she’s kind of a nobody.
And she’s young, blonde, attractive, and unprincipled: she’ll have a job
at Fox News whenever she wants one.
Little Marco is a different story. He actually gave something up to be part of
this administration, only to be used as potential target practice: not a
comfortable position. What’s worse: those accompanying Trump out of Türkiye included 47’s mistress executive assistant Natalie Harp,
deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, director of Oval Office operations Walt
Nauta… and Pete Hegseth. Yes, Dear
Leader was willing to sacrifice the only qualified person in his administration
to save a drunken, philandering, bloviating incompetent.
It’s gotta be tough to be Marco Rubio about now.
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