PDA

View Full Version : South carolina governor sued for importing muslims



EE_
18th February 2016, 04:00 PM
This election sure is shining a light on who the scumbags are!

SOUTH CAROLINA GOVERNOR SUED FOR IMPORTING MUSLIMS
Backlash comes as she endorses Marco Rubio
Published: 1 day ago

http://www.wnd.com/files/2012/03/nikki_haley.jpg
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley

South Carolina has been at the forefront of the battle against President Obama’s refugee resettlement plans for nearly a year, with grassroots activists fighting not only the White House but their own Republican Gov. Nikki Haley.

Since that time, it has become apparent to South Carolina conservatives, including many who voted for Haley, that she is a supporter of Obama’s drive to convert millions of recent immigrants into “new Americans” by the time he leaves office, using not only the United Nations refugee pipeline but also a steady influx of illegal immigrants from Central America.

Haley has supported the president’s plan to bring in refugees from jihadist hotspots like Syria and Iraq, the activists say, while also quietly embracing Obama’s resettlement of illegal Central American children in their state, using the family courts to secretly place them in communities without their knowledge or approval.

So now they’re taking their battle against Haley into the courtroom, filing a lawsuit against the governor, the State Department of Social Services, and two church-based organizations that help the government transplant refugees not only in South Carolina but dozens of cities and towns across America.

The suit seeks to halt all resettlement of refugees in South Carolina “until a full accounting of any and all federal money used in this program and specifically where it was allocated and how allocated (and) in which counties.”

Let your voice be heard: Sign the petition urging Congress to temporarily halt Muslim immigration into the U.S. until a proper vetting system is established.

South Carolina’s brouhaha over refugees erupted in March 2015 when a local newspaper ran an article “announcing” that World Relief Corp. planned to partner with churches and resettle about a dozen Syrians in the Spartanburg area. Secretary of State John Kerry dispatched his top refugee overseer, Assistant Secretary of State Anne Richard, to the Palmetto state to calm nerves.

Thus far no Syrians have been sent to Spartanburg and only three have been placed in the state, near Columbia.

The plaintiff in the civil case is Brian Bilbro, a husband and father of two young girls who lives near Columbia in Richland County and works in medical sales. He says he and other South Carolina families have not had their concerns addressed, or even taken seriously, by Haley’s administration or the state legislature.

Brian Bilbro is the plaintiff in a case against refugee resettlement in South Carolina.
“I’m not a part of any rightwing groups, not involved with the NRA, just a normal taxpaying citizen who is concerned for the safety of his family,” Bilbro told WND.

“Over the past year I’ve really become aware and concerned about what’s going on in our world and our country and the fact that the Muslim states have really taken it up a notch toward Christians and people like myself,” Bilbro added. “I’m not an Islamophobe but I’m just observing and if anyone can’t look at Europe and see what’s happening there then they have their heads in the sand. These people are getting very aggressive and I look at my daughters not as people they can do what they want with. I want to protect them. I just said, somebody’s got to stand up and make a stand, so really I did it for our children and the children of our state.”

Bilbro attended a legislative committee hearing on refugees in Columbia last month but didn’t feel like his concerns were taken seriously by the lawmakers.

“One senator said it’s just the way the world is now, that we live in a more dangerous world, and tough luck. He didn’t care that 26 citizens had expressed their concerns,” Bilbro said.

Haley endorses ‘amnesty’ candidate Rubio

Even though South Carolina is a heavily Republican state, with a key presidential primary looming on Saturday, it remains under the control of the establishment wing of the party, a fact that is borne out by the string of recent endorsements: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has endorsed Jeb Bush for president, while the state’s other senator, Tim Scott, has endorsed Marco Rubio, and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., has endorsed Rubio.

But tea party-type activists say the most stunning betrayal has come from Haley. After first saying she would not endorse a candidate prior to the March 1 primary, Haley announced Wednesday she is falling in line with the other state Republican leaders and backing Rubio, author of the 2013 Gang of Eight immigration bill that conservatives called “amnesty.”

Just last month, Haley was quoted in the Washington Post saying: “Marco Rubio believes in amnesty, which I don’t.” She later walked back the comments when it was clear she had caused problems for the Rubio campaign in South Carolina.

The rise of Donald Trump in this state illustrates just how far from their base the one-time tea party darlings – Haley, Gowdy and Scott – have strayed.

According to the latest CNN/ORC poll, Trump is running away from the GOP pack in South Carolina while beating the drum against illegal immigration, Muslim immigration, and refugee resettlement.

Conservative firebrand and Trump supporter Ann Coulter on Wednesday heaped scorn on Haley for endorsing Rubio.

Coulter was also critical of Haley after the governor took clear aim at Trump during her Republican response to the president’s State of the Union speech on Jan. 12. Haley warned against rhetoric that would threaten “the dream that is America” for others.

ann coulter tweet

Trump has 38 percent support among South Carolinians likely to vote in Saturday’s primary, followed by Ted Cruz with 22 percent, Rubio with 14 percent and Bush with 10 percent.

South Carolina has not historically been a major landing point for foreign refugees. Only 1,858 have been sent to the state since 2002, according to the federal refugee database, compared to more than 75,000 sent to Texas over the same period. But, with the backing of the state’s powerful hotel and hospitality industry along with others in the business community, the state’s GOP leaders have warmed up to the idea of becoming more “welcoming” of foreign labor.

‘Rubber stamping’ green card applications

Jessica Vaughan, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, filed an affidavit in the South Carolina suit against Haley’s cooperation with the Obama resettlement plan.

Vaughan said she was contacted by Lauren Martel, an attorney who practices family law in the Hilton Head Island area and is representing the plaintiff, Bilbro.

“Lauren started noticing some things. She became concerned, because of what she was seeing in family court in Beaufort County with the unaccompanied alien children,” Vaughan said.

Martel noticed the courts were increasingly “rubber stamping” the issuance of green cards for minors without seeing any proof that they were actually under a threat of violence and abuse in their home countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, Vaughan said.

“These kids claim to be abused and neglected in their home country without any corroboration by anybody,” she said. “It’s just their words, their statement and claim, whereas if an American were involved the courts would require more documentation for issuing restraining orders or any other sort of benefits from the state.”

“She (Martel) asked me where these kids were coming from and I said they’re being placed there by the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and these are the same people talking about bringing in Syrian refugees to South Carolina,” Vaughan added.

“It’s the same government agency, the same nonprofit contractors, and the same process whereby the local community doesn’t get a say, and the citizens believe the state isn’t fulfilling its obligations under the law to allow local communities to object and they’re upset about the costs imposed on the community as a result of the government bringing in large groups of refugees as well as the UACs.”

While the refugee issue has been a major source of discord in South Carolina for months, most of the presidential candidates would rather not talk about it. The issue almost never comes up in the GOP debates, and when it does the candidates have glossed over their previous support for refugees and amnesty for illegals.

Rubio, for example, was an author of the Gang of Eight bill that cleared the Senate in 2013 under the banner of “immigration reform.” The bill, which died in the House, would have expanded refugee resettlement, doubled the number of green cards and more than tripled the number of H1-B foreign guest-workers allowed into the country each year.

Rubio, Cruz, Bush and John Kasich have all been critical of Trump’s plan to temporarily halt all Muslim immigration, including those coming as refugees.

The security risk of Muslim refugees has especially concerned many South Carolinians. They cite FBI Director James Comey’s October 2015 testimony before Congress in which he said it was virtually impossible to confirm the identities of the vast majority of Syrian refugees.

The U.S. already issues more than 120,000 green cards per year to persons from Muslim-dominated countries with Pakistan, Iraq and Bangladesh among the top recipients of the coveted cards, which provide lawful permanent residency and an inside track to full citizenship.

The U.S. has issued a staggering 680,000 green cards to individuals from Muslim countries over a five-year period under President Obama.

The U.S. issues two green cards to Muslims each year for every one South Carolina birth.

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/11/green-cards-issued-muslim.jpg

green cards issued muslim

The U.S. is currently taking in a record number of legal immigrants at 1.1 million per year. It admits nearly six migrants (temporary guest-workers, students and permanent residents) for every one South Carolina birth.

Up to 40,000 Muslims come to the U.S. each year as refugees, with the majority coming from failed states such as Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, where law enforcement records on their backgrounds are inadequate or nonexistent.

“There are many problems, and to me the two most concerning problems are the refugees being brought in even though the federal government doesn’t have the ability to screen them, and second, these juveniles who are brought in from Central America and then the government not screening them, losing track of them, and in many areas of the country causing problems,” Vaughan said. “So my affidavit was filed to say there are going to be some costs and risks associated with this program in South Carolina. It focuses on costs and risks of those two key programs run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement and how the communities ought to have more of a role and the state ought to be held accountable for its role in facilitating these resettlements. These are genuinely areas of concern that cannot be brushed aside.”

High welfare costs and cultural tensions

Along with the security risks are the costs of refugee resettlement. The program itself costs more than $2 billion a year to administer, but that doesn’t county the heavy welfare usage among refugees nor the costs of educating their children.

Data from the Office of Refugee Resettlement shows that 91 percent of refugees from the Middle East use food stamps, and 68 percent receive cash benefits. And once the Muslim population grows to a certain level, the costs only escalate as demands grow for costly concessions such as the installation of ritual footbaths in public schools — a source of contention now in some Minnesota school districts.

Then there are the cultural costs. Thousands of Muslim girls are at risk of female genital mutilation in the United States, according to Daniel Akbari, a former top Shariah lawyer in Iran who defected to the U.S. in 2008 and authored the book, “Honor Killings: A Professional’s Guide to Sexual Relations and Ghayra Violence from the Islamic Sources.”

A recent case in Phoenix, Arizona, involved Mohamed Abdullahi, a 30-year-old refugee from Somalia resettled in the state by Catholic Charities. He entered into a “Nikah,” which is an arranged Islamic marriage, with the parents of an 18-year-old Muslim woman.

Phoenix police arrested him April 22, 2015, on charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. The Arizona Republic reported that his bride-to-be was brought to his apartment that day by her parents, against her will.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, told Fox News that such violence has “no basis in the Islamic faith.”

Apparently CAIR has not read verse 4:34 of the Quran.

“Chapter 4, verse 34, of the Quran expressly says if a woman does not comply with her husband’s command he has the right to beat her, and that is what you see happening here and what has happened over 1,400 years,” Akbari said. “What is going on here in Phoenix is totally Islamic, under Shariah.”

Akbari said it’s time U.S. media stopped falling for the “explain it away” propaganda put out by CAIR.

According to the Arizona Republic, the woman’s parents arranged the marriage with Abdullahi and their daughter in November 2014 without her knowledge, according to court records. When the woman learned of the marriage, she fled the state but returned 15 days later to finish high school, police said.

The woman’s parents drove her to Abdullahi’s apartment. Once she was inside, Abdullahi reportedly punched her in the left eye, causing her to fall to the ground, according to court records.

Abdullahi then allegedly grabbed his future bride around the throat and began strangling her while she was on the ground.

At that point, Abdullahi dragged the woman into the bedroom and proceeded to rape her, police said.

Defendants include Christian nonprofit groups

Bilbro’s suit names four defendants: Gov. Haley, DSS directors Susan Alford and Dorothy Addison, World Relief Spartanburg (Jason Lee director) and Lutheran Services Carolinas. World Relief has been working to place refugees from Syria and elsewhere in the Greenville-Spartanburg or “upstate” area of South Carolina while the Lutherans have been working to place refugees in and around the state capital of Columbia.

North Carolina-based Lutheran Services Carolinas reported 2014 revenues of $15.3 million and Baltimore-based World Relief reported revenues of more than $52 million for 2014.

The suit was filed Feb. 12 in the state’s Fifth Circuit Court of Common Pleas in Columbia (Case #CP-40-00918). The civil action seeks a motion for temporary injunction, temporary restraining order and appointment of a receiver.

“My grandmother used to tell me it’s better to be safe than sorry,” Bilbro told WND. “That’s a very basic statement but if we have our FBI director telling us we don’t have the ability to vet these people properly then I think we need to stop and figure out what’s going on with these refugees coming into our country. Even if it’s just 1 percent who are bad that’s still an enormous amount of people who are going to be spread out around our country, and we’ve already seen what’s beginning to happen in Germany, France, Belgium and even Dearborn, Michigan, when they come in and don’t want to assimilate.”

Bilbro said he hopes there won’t be a backlash against him or his family for filing the lawsuit.

“God I hope not. I just want the safety of my family. I’m going to do it anyway and pray God’s got his hand of protection on me,” he said. “I don’t want anything, I just want our kids to be safe, and our tax dollars to be spent correctly, not on people who are going to try to hurt us.”

Martel said the state Legislature is not really organized to act quickly and that is why her client felt compelled to seek redress in the courts.

“They can’t do anything as quickly as we believe it’s needed because every day that goes by we have tax dollars being used as they shouldn’t be,” Martel said. “We hope the court will look at the totality of our pleadings and all of our experts who have filed affidavits.”

Bilbro said he hopes the court system will be more open minded than most of the lawmakers he encountered at the Capitol.

“You can express your feelings before a subcommittee, you can express yourself on Facebook and you can write articles but where is it getting us?” he said. “Unless a judge slams down a hammer and issues a ruling, nothing’s going to be done.”


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2016/02/refugee-lovin-governor-sued-for-importing-muslims/#b8SxsjxzDr764vOQ.99

EE_
18th February 2016, 04:04 PM
The Mainstream Media Wants Marco Rubio To Be Your Next President
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/16/2016 21:30 -0500

So here is how you play the media like an accordion.

First, you deliver a debate performance so notably bad, so mechanical and unthinking, that you have everyone buzzing about it, even those in the media who gush over you. Then you take responsibility for being awful because, after all, you don’t want to give the impression that you might not really be responsible for uttering the words you uttered – four times.

Then you invite a bunch of reporters on your campaign plane to show what a personable fellow Marco Rubio is, how unrehearsed and natural, and they take the bait, basically writing mash notes about how unrehearsed and natural you are. Note Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post: “His hour-long charter flight interview also did not begin with an emphasis on his ‘new American century’ theme, as is often the case. Instead, it started with Twix bars: Rubio wanted to demonstrate how cold and hard they were after explaining at breakfast that he had cracked a molar biting into one.” What a normal, unrobotic guy!

And then the piece de resistance. You don’t repeat yourself mindlessly at the next debate. You give exactly the same kind of debate performance you gave before Gov. Chris Christie called you out, sounding like a polished kid in a high school debate club. And guess what? Surprise of surprises, the media declare you the winner because you didn’t make the same idiotic mistake you made the last time out. Chris Cillizza of the Post found him “thoughtful, nuanced and convincing.” (Whatever else one might say about them, nuanced is about the last thing any of these Republicans is.) The reliable Republican booster, Jennifer Rubin, in the same paper called his performance a “strong comeback.” CNN: “Rubio turned in a notably better performance than he did the last time.” Charles Krauthammer: “I think he was number one, Rubio.” And, best of all, from the Washington Examiner: “The narrative coming out of this debate will be about Rubio redeeming himself.”
Exactly. The narrative the press comes away with – the narrative they just happen to be writing — is that Rubio is back. But, let’s face it. He isn’t back because he was so brilliant last Saturday night, wielding some sort of rapier wit or intellectual superiority or a plethora of ideas. The New York Times, which hasn’t had much of a Rubio crush, save for a small post-Iowa lapse, found him lackluster. No. He’s back because the media desperately need him to come back to save the Republic from Trump and Cruz. The media, who are usually just content to stir up some trouble so that they can cover it, have got a horse in this race, and they are going to keep whipping him to the finish line, even after he stumbles.

It’s enough to give you whiplash. Two weeks ago, the media cheered Marco Rubio’s third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses – yes, third place – as a stunning victory. On Tuesday, NBC Nightly News declared “Rubio Rising.” Before the Iowa vote, The New York Times reported, “A Resurgent Marco Rubio Sprints to the Finish in Iowa” and then, after the vote, bannered, “Marco Rubio Sees Bounce in Latest New Hampshire Poll.”

Two days later it ran an idolatrous piece (that aforementioned lapse) which would turn into a major goof considering what was to come: “Once Cautious in Campaign, Rubio Shows More of His Personal Side.” The AP also gushed: “Rubio Could See Fortunes Rise From Iowa Finish.” “Rubio Soars,” wrote Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin. CNN’s Alex Conant explained, “Why Marco Rubio is the Real Winner.” Bill O’Reilly declared “Rubio a big winner.” Did I mention he finished third with 23% of the vote?



Then came New Hampshire, where Rubio finished fifth behind even the political zombie Jeb Bush, prompting Nick Baumann of The Huffington Post to crack sarcastically: “Marco Rubio Was the Real Winner of the New Hampshire Primary.” And now? He’s baaaack

Before we get to the debate debacle in which New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie eviscerated Rubio and derailed his candidacy (at least temporarily), you have to understand why the media seem to love Rubio, and why they were willing to elevate him to frontrunner status when he was barely registering in the polls they so worship, not only because it helps explain Rubio but also because it helps explain the media.



It was back in February 2013 that TIME magazine ran its now-famous cover of Rubio, staring confidently into the camera, with “The Republican Savior” slathered over him in big yellow letters. Here is how Michael Grunwald’s article began:

“Oriales Garcia Rubio knows how it feels to want more. When she was a girl in central Cuba in the 1930s, her family of nine lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor. Her dolls were Coke bottles dressed in rags. She dreamed of becoming an actress. Instead she married a security guard, moved with him to the U.S. and found work as a hotel maid. Her husband got a job as a bartender while starting a series of failed businesses – a vegetable stand, a dry cleaner, a grocery. They never had much. But their house had a real floor. Their daughters had real dolls. They sent all four of their children to college to chase their own dreams.”
No, that’s not a Rubio press release. That was actually written by a journalist. But you can see the appeal. It is a stirring if somewhat stale narrative, and the media are narratively driven. It panders to American exceptionalism, and the media are, after all, in the pandering business. And it turns Rubio into a star, and the media are into the star making.

None of this would matter, of course, if Rubio didn’t also have the aesthetic desiderata the media adore. Despite the saying that politics is show business for ugly people, the media recognize the role of aesthetics. Mitt Romney based his entire political career on them. Rubio was young, which meant he was new – an iPhone 6 in an iPhone 5 business. He had “boyish good looks” according to Grunwald. He knew how to give a good speech – “a compelling speaker,” said Grunwald. He was Hispanic in a party that had pretty much disdained Hispanics even though that demographic was expanding. And he had seemed to strike a balance between idealism and pragmatism – between the aspirational, as pundits like to call it, and the political.

In short, he was a designer candidate – practically hand-tooled to fill the holes in the Republican demographic, which is why he was allowed to jump the line to get to the presidency.

And then there was the symmetry. Rubio is often called the GOP’s Barack Obama, given their ages and the fact that both were first-term senators at the time of their candidacies. They each have minority status, they delivered well-received keynote speeches at their party conventions, and they were ambitious enough not to wait their turn. (Of course the dissimilarities are far more striking.)

The mainstream media love this sort of symmetry – Rubio is Obama, Sanders is Trump, the Clintons are the Bushes — presumably because it allows them to appear balanced and thus defend themselves from the bias flak they invariably take. It is the Newton’s Law of political coverage that for every action in one party, there is an equal and opposite reaction in the other, though these are usually false equivalencies that have served to make the Republican Party seem more rational than it really is. Denial of climate change? Well, Democrats want to stop coal-burning plants. So there!

For Rubio, symmetry had another advantage besides making him seem less extremist. It made him the youthful idealist of the party, its unifier, and blessed him with a sense of Obama-like inevitability.

And that was before the 2016 race began to unfold. No one suspected in the early going that Donald Trump, a kind of novelty candidate, would actually gain traction, much less become a serious contender. And though the media knew that Cruz would have a formidable advantage in his evangelical base, no one took him seriously as the actual nominee for the simple reason that just about everyone in the party except the extremist rank and file hated him.

Rubio’s only real competitor for what pundits call the “moderate lane” way back in the fall was Jeb Bush, and he was a tired one at that. Once the race began, however, and Trump and Cruz attracted their constituencies, while Jeb foundered, the Florida senator became not only the Chosen One but also the Great Hispanic Hope who, we are told endlessly, is the candidate who can and must stop Trump and Cruz from getting the nomination. Among party stalwarts, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has him with a commanding lead in the endorsement poll.

It is certainly no coincidence that the media, who loathed Trump and didn’t like Cruz much either, saw Rubio as their kind of candidate, too. That is precisely the argument New York Times’ columnist Ross Douthat made back in October when he predicted Rubio would be the GOP nominee. The party had no choice, he wrote, since it couldn’t possibly nominate Trump (or Carson back then) and Cruz had that likeability problem. And don’t forget this when you consider why Rubio is such a media favorite: whereas Trump and Cruz don’t need the media, Rubio needs them desperately. With his thin resume, they give him credibility. The media enjoy that power. They like being kingmakers, or even savior-makers.

The new narrative of the campaign season, then, was that Trump might pull in the “angries” and Cruz the “crazies,” but that one establishment candidate would emerge to stop them and that Rubio was the most likely to do so, which is why he got such an outpouring of media attention after Iowa. Not incidentally, this also plays into one of the few demonstrable media biases. The mainstream press likes moderates, or at least those they perceive to be moderates, much better than it likes extremists or alleged extremists. Presumably it fits the press’s self-image both as objective observers and as national stewards, gently guiding the country away from the fringes. Rubio is not a moderate by any means. In fact, he brags that he is the most conservative candidate in the race, and he might not be far off. But in this field, the media have apparently decided he is one because, again, they may feel they have no other choice.

So there it was – Trump bloviating toward a New Hampshire victory, Cruz lazing his way through the state on his way to Super Tuesday and the South, and Rubio, the fair-haired boy, needing only a second or third-place finish to set the media hearts aflutter. What happened last Saturday night at the Republican debate, with Chris Christie’s perfectly timed attack on Rubio’s authenticity, suddenly changed all that.

We know now that Rubio committed a huge gaffe by repeating verbatim four times a little speech about Obama deliberately changing America, just as Christie was accusing him of repeating the same rote speeches again and again and again. (It is worth mentioning, since no one seems to have done so, that the substance of Rubio’s charge of Obama being the first president to change the country, which should have been the object of obloquy, is both idiotic and just plain wrong.) But the problem really wasn’t that Rubio was on autopilot. He had been on autopilot throughout the entire campaign. Indeed, Rubio had often been praised by the media for the very thing Christie called him out on. Rubio had “got his message locked down,” according to one reporter. He was “well-spoken” and “articulate” – a “great debater.” In debate after debate, in which he recited his talking points mechanically without any hesitation or evident ratiocination, the pundits declared him a winner.

What voters didn’t seem to know, and what they certainly weren’t told by the media, is that whenever Rubio appeared, he was regurgitating what he had memorized. If you do a Lexis-Nexis search of the terms “Rubio” and “robot” in major newspapers from January 1 through February 6, here is what you will find: Not once was the term “robot” or “robotic” applied to him.

Political reporter Jason Zengerle of GQ explained why. “Want to know a dirty little secret about political journalists?” he wrote on his blog after the debate. “A lot of the time, we don’t pay attention to the speeches of the politicians we cover.”

Yes, they all heard Rubio saying the same things over and over. The father/bartender story, the mother/K-Mart story, the American Dream stuff, etc. etc., etc. – all canned. And, Zengerle goes on: “Even Rubio’s jokes are canned. And Rubio doesn’t merely confine these lines to his stump speech. They unerringly show up in debates and his answers to voters’ questions, as well. In fact, when The New York Times recently published a story about Rubio’s supposedly ‘intimate—and increasingly improvised—glimpses’ into his life in response to voters’ questions [the story cited earlier], at least two of the examples buttressing this dubious claim were well-worn passages from his stump speech.”

So, many in the press knew. They knew what Christie knew. They knew Rubio wouldn’t, couldn’t, deviate from the script. Why didn’t they tell us? Because they didn’t much care, even if Rubio continuously crossed the line from repetitive to rehearsed to robotic. What’s more, they didn’t think the voters would care either.

Again, Zengerle of Christie’s criticisms: “It was hard to imagine them striking a chord with voters.” Even after Rubio’s Teddy Ruxpin performance, Byron York of the Washington Examiner wrote that the press coverage of Rubio’s debate flub “showed again how the concerns of the media commentators are sometimes far from the minds of the actual voters.” And, York didn’t seem to realize, sometimes they aren’t. The press couldn’t imagine that voters might actually want candidates who were thoughtful and authentic and intellectually nimble.

What the MSM did not think worthy of reporting, however, the blogosphere did report. (In fairness, one local New Hampshire reporter, Erik Eisele of The Conway Daily Sun, wrote on December 23, after spending twenty minutes with Rubio for an editorial interview, that “it was like someone wound him up, pointed him towards the doors, and pushed play.”) Go back into the Twitter-sphere – way back to last year – and you’ll find hundreds if not thousands of tweets talking specifically about Rubio’s repetitions, about his canned speeches, about his avoiding answering press questions, about his obsession with his talking points. The tweeters knew, many of them, because they had seen him doing it during the debates – the very same debate performances the media lauded. And when Christie, who may very well have been following the lead of the Twitter-sphere, lunged, Twitter erupted. (An argument actually ensued over whether Marcobot was a better moniker for Rubio than Rubiobot.) It took Christie to do the work the media should have been doing. But it probably took the blogosphere and social media to poke Christie.

And then, and only then, the media pounced, not because they observed something they hadn’t previously seen, but because, I guess, they didn’t want to be left behind by the social media. (It is hard to keep a tally of how many YouTube views of the Rubio repetitions there have been; I lost count at about two million.) Thus did Rubio’s standard operating procedure become his Howard Dean Scream or his Rick Perry Brain Freeze.

But there were differences between his gaffe and theirs, not the least being that Rubio’s was not an aberration; it was his campaign. The media didn’t need any prompting to humiliate and ultimately destroy Dean and Perry because the media didn’t particularly like them. Dean’s media narrative was that he was a lucky, somewhat daffy, beneficiary of a leftish tilt in the Democratic Party after the Iraq War, and Perry’s was that he was a dunce. Their actions only confirmed the pre-existing narratives, and the media were only too happy to amplify their missteps in print and on the air. (When you come right down to it, Dean’s exuberance, which turned out to be a mic problem not a candidate problem, or Perry’s forgetfulness really weren’t much of anything, except for confirming the media narrative.)

On the other hand, the media liked Rubio. They were the ones who had helped propel him. They didn’t want to pile on. But when Christie underlined Rubio’s mindless parroting, he not only struck at one of the struts of Rubio’s alleged strength – that well-spokenness – and made him look foolish, he made the media look foolish, too. Rubio turned out to be a confirmation of exactly what Christie had said he was – a “student council president,” an empty suit, a face-man. As Ross Douthat, who had predicted Rubio’s eventual victory, tweeted that debate night: “I’ve watched Rubio for a long time, always thought that critiques of him as a talking points robot were way overblown. But oh dear.”

You might have thought Rubio would be finished. And If Marcobot had become a meme, like the Scream or the Brain Freeze, he would indeed have become political toast. Now we know that is not going to happen. The only story the media like better than burying a candidate is resurrecting one, and Rubio had already been anointed the savior. What’s more, the GOP establishment and the media still need their unifier, the hero to oppose the villains Trump and Cruz, and there aren’t too many candidates left from whom to choose, only Rubio, Bush and Kasich. And Rubio, for his part, has a Dracula candidacy. You get the feeling you’ll have to put a stake through its heart to stop it.
Trying to save himself, Rubio was contrite on election night in New Hampshire. He said he accepted responsibility for what had happened and promised he wouldn’t do it again, though exactly what that meant was hard to parse. Of course, he was responsible. Who else could be? And what wouldn’t he do again? Repeat himself word for word four times while he was being told he kept repeating himself? But no sooner had Rubio issued his mea culpa than Van Jones, one of CNN’s talking heads, pronounced himself impressed, and said it “took a lot of character” for Rubio to do what he had done. Later that week, on the PBS NewsHour, Mark Shields said the same thing. He actually praised Rubio for taking responsibility.

So the rehabilitation had begun almost as soon as the New Hampshire debate ended, and it was pre-ordained that as soon as the South Carolina debate ended, the media would announce that Rubio is back on the ascent — a self-fulfilling prophecy, if ever there was one. After all, the media were the ones writing the script. It is going to take a lot more than self-inflicted wounds to fell this candidacy. It is going to take an objective media. Good luck with that.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-16/mainstream-media-wants-marco-rubio-be-your-next-president

Comments:
ACP's picture
FOX management has ordered their reporters to support Rubio and thus lose to Hillary, to maintain ratings during another 8 years of fascist rule.

cheka.
18th February 2016, 05:01 PM
neocon radio is pushing crooz. crubio..yup

Ares
18th February 2016, 05:19 PM
Haley is turning into a real shit bag.

EE_
18th February 2016, 05:40 PM
Haley is turning into a real shit bag.

Yes, she was responsible for removing the confederate flag.

https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/confederate-flag-removal.jpg?w=650

Cebu_4_2
18th February 2016, 06:34 PM
Yes, she was responsible for removing the confederate flag.

cars and trucks spotting the 1 of 5 houses have the confederate flag.
Drive around here not counting the

EE_
18th February 2016, 06:35 PM
cars and trucks spotting the 1 of 5 houses have the confederate flag.
Drive around here not counting the

In SC?

Cebu_4_2
18th February 2016, 06:40 PM
In SC?


Yeastern TN. Any day including major car shows. The confederate flag shows no sign of going away here.

Ares
18th February 2016, 06:59 PM
I see the Confederate flag flying quite a bit here actually. Mostly on homes (trailers for the most part) but see it on custom (non-state issued) license plates and bumper stickers.

Cebu_4_2
18th February 2016, 07:16 PM
Any self respecting sutherner knows the value if the confederate flag and what it stands for.

This is what wiki says which is far from the truth:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/8-things-didnt-know-confederate-flag/