The Owls' Nest

Click here for an article entitled "Death of a Mannequin: Marco Rubio's Last Day" by Jeb Lund at Rolling Stone. It's a great autopsy of Marco Rubio's (Marquetito's?) political career, but what I love about this article is something I have said repeatedly about Rubio: He is self-described as the "new wave" of Republicanism, a new, fresh approach to politics -- and the policies he espouses are paleo-Republican, circa 1980.

But Rubio was a Reagan Republican in the same way that all other Republicans are Reagan Republicans: 95 percent of what he believes hasn't been updated since 1981.

Amen. May Marco Rubio's political career rest in peace, and may it be joined by Paul Ryan's.

A little clip from the article that seems a propos, discussing Rubio's idea of policy:

All Marco would have had to do was open his mouth and leave it there while a 40-year-old tape loop played, periodically interrupted by a new overdub saying the word "Uber."

The ending paragraphs are exquisite:

It was Rubio's campaign, after all, that announced, "Nothing matters if we aren't safe," that inflated a potential single Iranian nuclear weapon into an existential threat to the whole United States, that portrayed the border as a sieve through which ISIS would infiltrate potentially thousands of terrorists, that implied we'd restart the Guantanamo torture machine, that said we'd nearly conceded the rest of the century to China, that proclaimed the next generation nearly certain to be immiserated compared to their parents and described the president as alternately a mortally dangerous incompetent and a godless Machiavelli who spent the last seven years fundamentally transforming the nation into an unrecognizable dystopia.

It was a masterpiece of bullshit, combining the Rubio experience's two true and constant outcomes: a text any follower could have reasonably assembled from the greatest hits, and one whose philosophical aspirations were invalidated by the person voicing them. Rubio's rhetoric never tried to soar higher than when it was being undermined by everything else he campaigned on.

It was the last weepy gesture of a bozo charlatan, and it sent most of the audience away unaffected. When he finished, people moved as if to exit and found themselves suddenly stopped by a room so full of journalists that everyone had their own personal interviewer.

On Thursday, Rubio told reporters that he is "not running for anything" and is going to "be a private citizen." And that, too, is almost certainly bullshit.