Last week, the Washington Post did a hard-hitting investigative expose’ on Senator Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) past, and discovered that he’d been living a lie. Instead of having fled Castro, it turns out that his parents actually came to the US before Castro took power. This put the lie to all of Rubio’s claims that they fled communism.
Well, that piece fell apart incredibly quickly when people actually did some real digging. Yes, Rubio’s parents had left before Castro came to power, but actually started to return afterwards. Rubio’s father started wrapping up the family business in Florida while his mother returned, got a good whiff of the way things were going, and came hustling back to the US, where they stayed. So, while you could argue, technically, that Castro didn’t drive them away, he still kept them away. Further, most reasonable people would say “close enough” when explaining it to a young child about where his family came from, and how they ended up in the US. Kind of like how most people first learn that the US won its independence from England in the Revolutionary War, but England didn’t fully accept that until after the War of 1812.
And then things got even more interesting. The Miami Herald did their own digging, as Rubio is one of their senators, and couldn’t find a single time he’d actually declared that his own family had fled Castro. All the public statements he’d made had been vague enough to encompass all Cuban refugees, regardless of when they’d left the island.
This comes only a brief time after the New York Times tried its own hit piece on Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), one of President Obama’s most persistent and powerful critics. That piece was so riddled with errors that even the shameless Times should have been embarrassed, and has been quietly retracting the errors, one piece at a time.
And I will never forget what the Times did to John McCain in 2008. First, they endorsed him just before the New Hampshire primary. Then, when he had the nomination all but sewn up, they released a smear piece that alleged (with no credible evidence beyond the words of some unnamed disgruntled staffers, who only hinted at it) that McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist. Basically, they set him up just so they could knock him down.
Now, this wouldn’t be so bad if it was just sloppy, sensationalist journalism. If they were like this in all cases. But the McCain smear came on the heels of the mainstream media ignoring and actively covering up John Edwards’ own affair. No, they seem to almost always focus on tearing down Republicans and covering up for Democrats.
You want proof? Look at the starting point of the Rubio case — he talked about the lives of his parents, even before he was born, and talked about how that had shaped his life. Now, the logical inference here is that since Rubio wasn’t around for the events, he’s going on the details told to him by his parents — and it’s the rare parent who doesn’t simplify or shade or spin the truth when raising their children. (I was in my late teens before I did the math and realized that my parents had not married 18 months before my birth, but 6.) He simply spoke of his reality.
But here’s where the bias comes in. Other politicians — even more prominent ones — have made similar “embellishments” of their family background, ones even more readily disproven, and have been given a pass. For example, President Barack Obama.
While campaigning, President Obama spoke of the civil rights movement as fundamental in his very existence. He even spoke of the legendary march on Birmingham as making his parents’ marriage possible. Later, he talked about the actions in Selma as key. Sadly for his tale, Birmingham was in 1965, Selma 1963, and his parents’ marriage was in February of 1961 — with his birth six months later. (Gee, that sounds familiar to me…)
More significantly, when Obama was pushing for his health care financing program, he talked about how his mother had struggled with the ovarian cancer that eventually claimed her life while fighting with her insurance company to cover her illness. Turns out he’d been fibbing a bit; her health insurer handled her case quite honorably; the fight she had was about getting disability insurance.
Now, by the Rubio/Issa/McCain standard, this would immediately call for a full, thorough investigation into the true facts behind Obama’s stories, explorations of what actually happened, how many times he’d told the falsehoods, and at what point he reasonably should have known that he was telling fables. But remember, this is not some prominent Republican, but the Democratic President of the United States — a far, far lower standard applies.
Plus, there’s the element that Obama’s fables — oh, hell, let’s call them “lies” — are fundamentally different from the tales of Rubio, Issa, and McCain. And that element is that they help advance the liberal/progressive agenda. His fairy tale about his parents’ marriage tying in to key elements of the civil rights movement lets him claim to be almost a literal heir to that movement, and his mother’s fictitious battle with her health insurer powered his push to get ObamaCare passed. On the other hand, the Republicans oppose that agenda, and therefore all’s fair.
There’s only so much that carelessness or incompetence can excuse. After a while, the steady, constant “errors” all falling into the same pattern makes the “accidental” explanation utterly unbelievable.
I figured this out a while ago. But every now and then, the media gives me a whole new example that is so egregious, I simply can’t resist publicly tossing it on to the pile of previous examples.
