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Yesterday I played a clip of Florida Senator Marco Rubio commenting on the President's non-budget, election year gimmick.  Rubio was suggesting that the Republicans in the Senate call the President's bluff and actually bring the bill up for a vote.  It would be political suicide for sitting Democrat Senators up for re-election this year to vote in favor of such a "budget."  The thing explodes the debt a few more trillion bucks.  You know, what Tim Geithner calls, "remarkably fiscally responsible?"

I agree with Rubio, by the way.  I think forcing Democrats to vote on something so irresponsible would be brilliant.  It forces them to either commit political suicide by voting for it, or to send a clear and unquestioned message to the American people that even Democrats recognize how irresponsible and how patently unserious the President's budget is.  It's a win-win for conservatives.  And Rubio realizes that.  I am becoming more and more impressed with this guy each passing day.

And apparently I'm not the only one.  The chirping about a Rubio Vice Presidential nod were only heightened by the fact that Rubio walked away with that post in a recent CPAC strawpoll.  Here were the results:

Now, what makes this really funny is what happened the day right before this vote on MSNBC.  The network is becoming more comical than Comedy Central.  It really is.  Here was their studious and serious Martin Bashir - and he must be studious and serious because he has a British accent (that's what passes as validation of your intellect at their network).  Bashir was commenting on a recent Rubio speech:

MARTIN BASHIR: Well done, Mr. Rubio, but don't be deceived by the applause because you're going to have to go an awful lot further if you want to be on this Republican ticket as vice president.

 

Mr. Rubio has already displayed some flare in rewriting his personal history for the sake of political progress. You may remember that in his official biography, he said that his parents came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover. If this were true, it would clearly add grit to Mr. Rubio's compelling life story, fleeing a communist dictator for the freedom and true liberty offered by the United States. But unfortunately, official documents suggest that Mr. Rubio's parents left Cuba more than two and a half years before Castro took power in 1959.

 

And just two years ago, in fact at CPAC 2010, Mr. Rubio described how his father left Cuba after suffering many hardships, including the loss of his mother when he was just six years old. But just seven months later, Mr. Rubio said that his father lost his mother when he was just shy of his ninth birthday.

 

Now, I'm not picking fights over tiny details, but it does reveal the enormous challenge that confronts this young politician who wants to make progress in a party that says multiculturalism is dead. He's already had to embellish his personal history. One wonders what else he'll have to do to make himself acceptable to perhaps the most selective incarnation of the Republican Party that we've seen in a very, very long time.

Okay, first of all, yes you are picking fights over tiny details, Mr. Bashir.  That's exactly what you just did.  Don't tell us you're not doing what the entirety of your comments amounted to.  This is all they have on Rubio.  So they try to make it scandalous.  But the bigger and the better story here is the fact that the anti-Cuban racism of the Republican Party, and conservatives in general, will make it nearly impossible for him to be chosen for party advancement.  This a day before the CPAC convention chooses him VP in a walk.