Is this a ten-year-old acting tough on the playground, or an actual US senator seeking a major party nomination for president? The latter, sad to say. Marco Rubio thinks quoting movie lines is the way to scare terrorists.
h/t Salon:
Not that this necessarily hurts his chances of winning the Republican nomination. As the Salon writer put it:
This is precisely the sort of dick-swinging swagger that conservatives loved (and still love) about George W. Bush. (When W. landed on the aircraft carrier to declare “Mission Accomplished,” G. Gordon Liddy was awestruck over how he could see Bush’s penis through his parachute harness.) The fact said swagger resulted in a decade-long foreign policy disaster that we’ll be struggling to clean up for many long years to come is secondary to the fact that the world knew that Bush was tough and would hit people really hard if they looked at America cross-wise. “Bring ‘em on,” Bush famously declared, channeling his inner action hero and taunting the enemies of America to just try and test our resolve.
Fear not that this is a one-off, nor be surprised that someone so seemingly simple-minded might also tweet this,
with a hat tip to another Salon writer:
I wonder if ran that past any Indians before hitting the tweet button? I more wonder if he really believes that spreading freedom came with territorial expansion just by coincidence, or if he's appealing hidebound patriots and figures saying something like that will help him?
Or maybe this is believed by Rubio's billionaire, Norman Braman, and is therefore obligatory if he wants the cash to keep flowing. WHat, you didn't know Rubio has a billionaire? Every Republican candidate needs a billionaire. It's like having a logo or slogan, or a campaign manager or a political sugar daddy. Wait, it is having a political sugar daddy, and Rubio has pretty much set up housing in Braman's pocket.
However he got there, Rubio's understanding of foreign policy and national defense is so shallow, he couldn't even handle softball questions on Fox that surely even he knew were coming. "Well, based on what we know now, a lot of things -- based on what we know now, I wouldn't have, you know, thought Manny Pacquiao was going to beat in -- in that fight a couple of weeks ago." Yep, #ThisGuyWantsToBePresident. Or as Josh Marshall put it:
There are so many things going on here: one is the deep, unresolved specter of the Iraq War looming over the Republican party, notwithstanding what seemed like a rapid fire consensus last week that it was a bad idea; another is the fact that Marco Rubio just doesn't seem like the most cognitively dexterous contender for the Republican nomination.
What Marshall forgets is Rubio is seeking the votes of the same people who picked George W. Bush and now keep
Jeb Bush near the top of the polls; "doesn't seem like the most cognitively dexterous contender" is a selling point.
#ThisGuyWantsToBePresident
cross-posted at MN Progressive Project