A Vice Above Rubio’s

By now most of the country has forgotten that last week Hillary Clinton, on the campaign trail in Iowa, claimed that her grandparents were all immigrants, when in fact only one of her grandparents was an immigrant. This misrepresentation might not seem altogether significant compared to other instances in which Hillary has practiced to deceive, especially about Benghazi. Not to mention her destruction of thousands of e-mails she wrote while Secretary of State or her family foundation’s alleged acceptance of foreign cash while she has served as Secretary of State – donations her foundation is continuing to accept even as media scrutiny grows.

But it’s worth noting that just a week after Hillary floated the grandparents story during a discussion of illegal immigration (and while pandering to the common folk), it has already practically disappeared from the web, at least in terms of commentary, eclipsed by fluff pieces about Hillary’s “classroom” on the campaign trail.

Contrast this treatment to that received by Florida Senator and recently announced 2016 Presidential hopeful Marco Rubio. In 2009, Rubio told a Tampa Bay TV station that his parents came from Cuba in 1959, presumably fleeing Castro’s communist revolution, as many Cubans did who lost their property and their beloved island nation. Apparently he also told FOX News’s Sean Hannity that his parents left in 1958 or ’59. His website also suggested his parents fled Castro.

But in September 2011, when pointedly asked by a Miami Herald reporter if his parents came before or after the Communist revolution in Cuba, Rubio said his parents emigrated “before” the revolution. Apparently it took a while for his official website to be updated, but it has been.

Much has been made of this inaccuracy for years now in U.S. media, with some analysts even arguing that because it suggests intentional distortion of family history for votes, Rubio has no chance at the Presidency or right to run for President. Among anti-Castro Cuban exiles in South Florida, passions run high, and Rubio’s critics have theorized his inaccurate recall of family history was an intentional distortion, and that by representing his parents as anti-Castro exiles when they weren’t technically fleeing Castro, he was pandering for the exile vote.

Regardless, his misstatement is no more suspect than Hillary’s of last week was. Yet I have yet to read one serious analyst who contends that Hillary’s patently false claim that all her grandparents were immigrants to the U.S. disqualifies Hillary to run for President.

And unlike Hillary’s broad false statement (“all my grandparents, you know, came over here”) the essence of Rubio’s immigrant relatives story – that his parents were immigrants, that they fled dictatorship in Cuba to find freedom and economic opportunity, that his father worked as a bartender and his mother as a maid after they arrived – is true.

At any rate, by any objective standard, Hillary’s misrepresentations and deceptions about numerous far more grave matters far outweigh Rubio’s single offense.

What is more serious, Rubio’s massaging of this story or the inherent conflict of interest in Clinton’s foundation allegedly taking money from foreign governments that had business before the State Department?

Or the way, on the eve of the 2012 election, Hillary and Obama blamed some hapless filmmaker for an al Qaeda terrorist attack against our embassy in Libya and the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans? Or the way they sent Susan Rice on the Sunday morning talk shows to blame this hapless individual?

The latter –much like the Clinton Foundation’s accepting the foreign cash and the disappearance of thousands of e-mails that surely contained official state business—reflects serious corruption.

I can’t help but chuckle over leftists’ worries about the Bush Administration and Patriot Act at this point. While they worried and some might say flattered themselves to imagine the government was reading their e-mails and that some greater serious violation of civil liberties was imminent, it was the Obama Administration that in a flagrant abuse of power used the internal Revenue Service to enforce tax law selectively against perceived political enemies.

More to come.

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on April 24, 2015 at 4:13 am and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>