Oh Joy! Only 80 Plus Weeks!

Oh Joy! Oh Rapture!

It’s only 80 plus weeks until the 2016 Presidential election and it’s started already!

Over the weekend we heard from the matriarch of one of America’s two royal families announcing that it was her turn to take the helm. After all, she is a woman and it’s time. The procession of Hillary to the nomination has begun.

No need to know where she stands on anything. She is for the “middle class” working people – not withstanding that she takes lots of money from Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Jeb, the next in line in the other royal family gets ready for his turn.

Florida is simply in a tizzy!

Yesterday our freshman Senator Marco announced that he, not the old Hillary or the old Jeb, is the face of the future. He is ready to rescue that American dream for all of us.

Florida’s billionaire donors now have to choose between the Prince of the Tea Party and a safe old Bushie. Decisions, decisions.

Marco will have plenty of company – all of the crazies will be out there. Cruz, Paul, Walker- with more to come.

Queen Hillary on the other hand seems to have it all to herself – her suffocating presence and her money keeping possible candidates out for now. There has been a movement to get Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders into the primary, thus far without success.

In the end none of it matters. We will get a Republican or a Republican-lite. No FDR type lefties, left populists or socialists allowed. The system is set up that way.

We don’t elect the President – the Electoral College does. The system is designed to wipe out third parties. The House is so gerrymandered that the GOP routinely gets less than 50% of the total House vote yet gets a majority of seats. The Senate is so bound up in it’s archaic rules, which no one wants to change, as to be essentially powerless.

As Emma G. observed a hundred years ago: “If voting changed anything they’d make it illegal!”.

Regarding the Tea Party Prince Marco, he got elected in a three way race with a plurality, not an outright majority of the vote. His opposition was Charlie Crist, the former republican governor of our fine state running as an independent after abandoning his party and Kendrick Meek, a black liberal Democrat from south Florida who never had a chance.

Senator Rubio hasn’t done squat in the Senate for this state or the country. He is a right wing water-carrier: pro-life, for the family, pro-gun, anti-government, pro-military, pro-war, pro-tax cuts, against the capital gains tax in total, pro-balanced budget amendment, anti-gay marriage, pro flat tax, pro-repeal of the estate tax.

He is against any deal with Iran and is for troops everywhere. A hawk of first order.

He loves to play the immigrant card and indeed, he did yesterday.

When he first ran for office in heavily Cuban Miami he spoke of how his mom and dad had fled the evil Fidel and communist oppression. They fled for political freedom to the United States. His mom and dad and her father fleeing during the height of the cold war from the godless commies.

It resonated so well among those who also fled Fidel.

Except it was a lie.

In October 2011, the St. Petersburg Times and The Washington Post reported that Rubio’s previous statements that his parents were forced to leave Cuba in 1959, after Fidel Castro came to power, were “incorrect.”

His parents left Cuba in 1956, during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. According to The Washington Post, Rubio’s “embellishments” resonated with many voters in Florida, who would not be as impressed by his family being economic migrants instead of political refugees from a communist regime.

Economic migrants. Like all the Mexicans? Tsk tsk.

Now don’t get me wrong.  There is nothing wrong with being an economic immigrant; what’s wrong is that he lied about it to curry political favor.

Prince Marco responded that it was all irrelevant.

But there was more.

Rubio’s maternal grandfather, Pedro Victor Garcia, had also immigrated legally to the U.S. in 1956, but returned to Cuba to find work in 1959. When he returned to the U.S. in 1962 without a visa, U.S. embassies in Cuba being closed, an immigration judge ordered him deported.

U.S. immigration authorities ultimately used their discretion to allow him to remain in the U.S. without a visa. In 2012, The Associated Press concluded that Garcia might have been undocumented for four years, from 1962 to 1966.

Seems Prince Marco’s grandfather was one of those “illegals” the GOP right is always screaming about.

Rubio’s immigration reform plan, for which he was so praised, proposed providing a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States.

Rubio’s onerous multi-step plan included fines, back taxes, background checks, and a lengthy probationary period. His proposal contrasted sharply with the Republican party’s long-held view that offering citizenship to undocumented immigrants is virtually the same as amnesty.

So he caved.

At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in 2015, Rubio stated that his biggest lesson from the experience was that Americans would not support comprehensive immigration reform until the border is secure. Now he’s for lots of border guards.

How quickly we forget where we came from and all the others trying to make the same journey.

How quickly we forget how easy the Cubans fleeing from dictatorship had it while we quickly deported those fleeing fascist dictatorship in Honduras and Nicaragua.

The hypocrisy is simply mind-boggling.

As for the immigrant card – Prince Marco, you are not Mario Cuomo.  I knew Mario Cuomo.  You’re no Mario Cuomo.

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