Ring of Fire, a progressive website, alleges (here) that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is a “complete idiot.”
I’m not sure I agree with that; part of him might not be an idiot, although right now I can’t say what it is. He’s not without smarts; he did graduate from a law school, though he never practiced law. He’s a career politician, the kind Republicans say they want to term-limit (but they don’t actually mean it when it comes to their own).
Rubio was once a rising young star in the pre-Trump Republican Party; some people thought he might even be president someday. He actually ran for president, but performed miserably in debates and primaries. Today, I’m pretty sure he’ll never be president. He may not even be a senator after the 2022 elections, although that would take bad luck.
So what stupid thing did he say today? As Huffington Post describes it, he “characterized former President Donald Trump taking top-secret documents from the White House when he left office as nothing more than a ‘storage’ issue.” (See story here.)
His exact statement was, “This is, really, at its core, a storage argument that they’re making,” and, “I don’t think a fight over storage of documents is worthy of what they’ve done ….”
I don’t want to belabor what by now is familiar ground, but it isn’t just a “storage” issue. Those documents are government property. It’s not inaccurate to say Trump stole them, although people who prefer to pussyfoot around might prefer to say he “assumed unauthorized possession” or something of that nature. Legal experts credibly explain how his year-long refusal to surrender them conceivably could lead to criminal obstruction charges.
In those documents were state secrets, poorly secure at a private residence that’s a magnet for foreign spies, and our spycatchers don’t yet know how gravely our national interests were compromised (or if they were); they’re working on it.
Rubio isn’t stupid; he knows all this as well as you and me. He uttered that stupid remark because, instead of acting like a United States Senator, he chooses to be Trump’s shoeshine boy.
That marks him as a political midget. And that mark’s gonna hurt.