Marco Rubio's 2nd Amendment Dud Over Iran
No, not the boxer: Florida's Marco Rubio, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate with about as much chance of winning as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (if he ran for the same seat), thinks Iranians don't have enough weapons in their hands. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
You'd think lawmakers from Florida, especially lawmakers running for U.S. Senate, would have the elementary idea to keep their mouth shut about other places' voting scandals, Florida having set the standard for modern-day parodies of democracy with the 2000 fraud. Not so Marco Rubio, the former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives and a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2010.
Rubio's idea of running Florida had more in common with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's domestic policies than with good governance: Florida government's finances are in ruins after a decade of raiding trust funds and slashing social programs to subsidize tax cuts, the state's economic anemia is second only to California's, and Florida's once-famed environment plays vassal to developers' whims, now that Rubio and his smashing policies have had their way.
Yet the guy thinks he has something to say about Iran. Or at least Tweet about it, as he did yesterday: "I have a feeling the situation in Iran would be a little different if they had a 2nd amendment like ours." This, incidentally, from a man hired last year as a one-course-per-semester, $69,000-a-year "professor" of politics, for mullahs' sake, at Florida International University. A mind should be a terrible thing to embarrass at taxpayers' expense.
Because it's not enough that the thuggery of a regime and its vigilantes think it's open season on wandering innocents like the now-world-famous, and late, Nada or the equally late but less famous Kaveh Alipour, the 19-year-old killed by a gunshot to the head as he was returning from an acting class in Tehran. What Iran needs is more violence and a lot more bloodshed, in Rubio's gun-racked calculus. What, exactly, does he think would happen if every Iranian had his AK-47? Instead of thugs on motorcycles on Iran's streets, we'd have thugs in tanks. Then what? Every Iraqi had his stash of weapons during the Saddam Hussein years. That didn't stop Hussein from massacring his own people at will.
I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the philosophy behind Rubio's idea, which isn't his anyway: Edward Abbey and others long ago spoke of the fundamental injustice (and folly) of any regime monopolizing weaponry. "We must," Abbey wrote, "regard with extreme suspicion any effort by the government--local, state or national-- to control our right to arms." Those monopolies can be signs of tyranny, though Iranians hold as many weapons, per capita, as British citizens, and no one, not even after the Blair years, is claiming that the Queen of England is slouching toward a tyrannous regime. The point being that projecting one's political and ideological conceits on another region of the world is never a good idea--not in policy (viz., Bush), not in Tweets (Rubio).
Rubio, of course, has no chance of winning his Senate run. He knows it. He's running against Charlie Crist, who could beat anyone on the strength of his tan alone (with teeth whitener in rear guard). Making debilitating noise is any hopeless politician's next-best stab at relevance.
But there's something to Rubio's bird-sized contribution to Iran's season of disgrace: It illustrates the embarrassing fantasies and ignorance that continue to pose as analysis this side of Persepolis. And it shows what gaps separate Americans from Iranians at so many levels, gaps both sides will have to contend with should there be room to talk when the thugs have had enough of smashing skulls and the protesters concede that the incoherence of their aims, from day one, was no way to run what they admitted, too late, should have been a counter-revolution.
See Also:
- Momentum Lost? Chilled Spines in Tehran
- BlogPulse: Hypocrisies of Iran Coverage
- Who Rules Iran and How? A Primer
Comments
An entire blog post about a Tweet? Are you serious? Get a life.
You’re absolutely right “Johnson.” Marc Rubio is a former House Speaker, a current contender for U.S. Senate and a compulsive publicity hog, but we should ignore anything he writes on his tweet page, whether or not it’s newsworthy, because it is, after all, a tweet, and as we’ve noticed with Iran, Twitter has made absolutely no difference whatsoever in the media landscape.
Listen, “Robert,” or “Johnson,” or Marco, or whatever your real name is: before you go inventing yourself a name and an email address to cover up your Rubio shilling, at least come up with a stronger debating point. This isn’t the way you’re going to either a) give Crist the semblance of a fight in the primary or b) have a life post-2010.
Meh, the only DUD here is you.
“…with the 2000 fraud.” What? Typical weak debating tactic… throw out a lie to make a point and then change the subject. The votes were counted and the republican candidate won in every way that matters legally. If, on the other hand, you really want to talk about voting fraud, let’s talk about ACORN.
But when you start a diatribe with a falsehood, it either means you are ignorant or dishonest. Either of those reasons compels me to not bother reading the rest of your drivel.
Jenkins, you’re so busy one-hand clapping your own lecture that you missed the point: the voting fraud was the least of it. The eight years of fraud that followed were the real kick in the rubber parts, as my old friend Arnold Beckoff would put it. At any rate thanks for finding the piece irresistible enough to make it all the way to the comment section. And use it.
Great write up. These neocon pigs and their culture of death and violence has proven to be nothing but utter failure year after year. These same chicken hawks who are now claiming to support an uprising in Iran are the same ones calling for the deaths of Iranian citizens just years ago. Remember McCain singing “bomb bomb Iran”. What sick, pathetic, uneducated swine.
So how’s the economy working out for you? Have you caught on that Tax & Spend doesn’t quite work – at all? Do you keep a tally on the Alleged President B. Hussein Obama’s foreign policy blunders? Or are you simply yet another hyper-partisan liberal who will say, do, and blindly support anything that spews from the socialist left?
Journalism at its worst. Pierre must hate American democracy and doesn’t believe the people of Iran deserve liberty from a dictator that rigs his elections.
And yet Pierre thinks he has something to say about the Middle East.
Tristam’s Liberalism is a mental disorder.
You idiot.
Marco meant that if the Iranian civilians had weapons instead of the Mullah-monopoly they could overthrow their tyrannical government.
Are you that dense?
You liberal sand monkey idiot, get back to the sand dunes and kiss a camels ass!!!!