"#TheThing" And Marco Rubio and His Unhinged Supporters

Reconsidering: Eh, while I still think that all of these people are nasty, I'm no stranger to personally wishing an alleged scandal would drop -- I remember being on tenterhooks about the latest vaporscandal claimed to be about to drop about Clinton during the nineties, for example.

A lot of what you're going to read below is me being shocked, shocked that there are some politics in politics, and that some political people are employed in the business of spreading derogatory rumors and gossip.

I also rewrote to narrow the focus of who it was, exactly, I was venting at. It's not all Trump supporters nor all Rubio supporters.

But there is a certain sort of animal, the Political Beast, that just isn't my cup of tea anymore.

Maybe I've just gotten older, and as I realize I have fewer minutes left in my life, I'm less willing to spend them on nasty shit.

At some point, I guess, one has to ask oneself: Exactly how important is this particular candidacy to me, and how much of my personal honor am I prepared to -- or required to, if the candidate in question requires a lot of sacrifice of honor to defend -- bargain away on his behalf?

There was a time that the conservative movement liked to flatter itself as being all about honor and even virtue.

I guess we're not pretending on that score any longer. I guess maybe that's for the best -- it's better to be honest about one's lack of honor, than to dishonestly flatter oneself postulating a deep commitment to honor that doesn't exist.

I should employ that rule I sometimes remind myself of -- don't post when angry.

And anyway, who cares? It's just America. America was breaking anyway, and Obama broke it forever.

We have to think more about starting anew than recovering something that's already gone.

...

I don't like Donald Trump because I consider him now to be utterly without honor, a nasty narcissistic man of nothing but appetites and impulses and Really Bad Business Deals that he then claims are "great deals."

Because he's a narcissist.

But I see now that these very low, very base traits are well-represented among Marco Rubio's elite-level super-fan cultists.

In fact, this Daily Beast article straight-up claims that the story has been pushed by "Marco Rubio allies" for quite some time, peddled to various outlets (like Breitbart) who all refused the garbage.

A half-dozen GOP operatives and media figures tell The Daily Beast that Cruz's opponents have been pushing charges of adultery for at least six months now--and that allies of former GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio were involved in spreading the smears.

For months and months, anti-Cruz operatives have pitched a variety of #CruzSexScandal stories to a host of prominent national publications, according to Republican operatives and media figures. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Politico, and ABC News--reporters at all those outlets heard some version of the Cruz-is-cheating story. None of them decided to run with rumors.

Those publications' representatives all declined to provide on-the-record comments when The Daily Beast reached out for this article.

Breitbart News, the notoriously Trump-friendly conservative outlet, was also pitched the story of Cruz’s extramarital affairs, according to a source close to the publication. That source said an operative allied with Marco Rubio--but not associated with his official campaign--showed the publication a compilation video of Cruz and a woman other than his wife coming out of the Capitol Grille restaurant and a hotel on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But the outlet opted not to report on the video, which demonstrated no direct evidence of an affair.

"We got it from a Rubio ally," said the source. "It was too thin, so [Breitbart's Washington political editor Matt Boyle] decided not to run it. There was no way to verify the claims."

A Rubio spokesman wasn’t immediately available for comment.

After Marco Rubio dropped out, I tried to avoid baiting his cultists. They were all very down (and continue to be very down -- some are taking some kind of delight in today's story).

But I'll tell you right now: I have never felt better to see the suffering of others than right now.

I'm glad your little sketchy amnesty bitch lost the race. He deserved to lose, and you-all deserve to cry your little Marco-lovin' eyes out over it.

Maybe Mario can drink your tears -- because, I'm given to understand, he really loves water.

For months I said Rubio people were silly.

But some of them are more than silly. They're nasty. They are, as a writer at the Wall Street Journal once said of another person's supporters, bitter people whose hearts have become envenomed.

It was never plausible that your pro-amnesty (still!) candidate could win the primary, and if you were too dumb to get that, you should work on your own understanding of the Republican primary electorate, instead of looking for scapegoats upon whom to blame this entirely-predictable outcome.

Oh, and if you're upset to discover that you're not smart enough to sell your pro-amnesty candidate as anti-amnesty to dumb people, sorry that you're just realizing you're not that smart, and other people aren't that dumb.

Meanwhile, the Trump's own Garbage People surrogates, operatives, and shills are pushing this as hard as they can, too.

For Those Who.. are either this dumb or like pretending to be really dumb, no, this doesn't mean that Trump's people didn't also push the story to the virtual Trump campaign extension National Enquirer.

The only operative quoted in the National Enquirer piece is, oddly enough, Roger Stone, who was either fired by Trump or fake fired by Trump, because he's still acting like a paid Trump surrogate and operative.

The article also quoted Roger Stone, a former Trump adviser who is still close to the real-estate mogul. "These stories have been swirling about Cruz for some time," Stone said in the National Enquirer. "I believe where there is smoke there is fire. I have to believe this will hurt him with his evangelical Christian supporters."

So spare me the "Obviously Trump could not have possibly had anything to do with this" stupidity. It certainly seems possible a Trump person pitched this to Trump's good friend David Pecker, editor of the National Enquirer -- I'm pretty sure Roger Stone could supply the phone number, if they lost it.

It's getting hard to tell if people are really this stupid or just pretending to be this stupid to spam comments with stupid sloganeering, and it's getting tedious to have to keep trying to tell the difference.

Oh One Last Thing: I don't even want to read about Mario Romo's "optimistic, positive, hopeful view of America" ever afuckingain.

posted by Ace at 03:54 PM

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