Marco Rubio's Shady Past as an Illegal Teenage Park Visitor
Can you really trust someone with this record?
So far during this presidential campaign, newspaper reporters have revealed a number of concerning facts about GOP candidate Marco Rubio's history: He once got a speeding ticket (along with three other driving infractions), he owns a boat, and—perhaps most damning at all—he drinks water.
Now The Washington Post has added yet another crucial bit of information to the GOP candidate's backstory: As a teenager, he was once arrested being in a park after it closed. He seems to have been drinking beer at the time.
Is there more? Not yet. Indeed, the trail goes suspiciously cold after the initial incident. As the Post report notes, "There's no indication that Rubio was involved in any illegal activity other than drinking beer and being in a public park after closing." The police report doesn't mention alcohol, and indicates no drugs were involved.
That Rubio was never put into custody, never hired a lawyer, and never appeared in court, according to his presidential campaign strategist, suggests the nature of the crime. And it may raise questions about his candidacy and fitness. Just what kind of a person are we dealing with here? Is this really someone we can entrust to run a federal government that, after all, operates a considerable amount of parkland? How much can you trust a man who once drank beer in a park?
The steady drip-drip-drip of details about Rubio's background and personal life has already told us plenty, and the application of more shoe leather from America's top newsgathering organizations will surely reveal even more.
In the meantime, you may also want to read George Will's recent column looking at some additional, possibly less interesting material from Rubio's past, like his long record of poor judgments when it comes to policy.
Will notes, for example, that Rubio has long supported federal sugar subsidies for a small band of families in his home state, and that his justifications for that support, which involve scare stories about America being "at the mercy of a foreign country for food security" are utter rubbish. In addition, Will writes, Rubio, like Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, was a loud and energetic backer of a poorly conceived military intervention in Libya.
Finally, Rubio backs a Senate bill known s the Campus Accountability and Safety Act. The bill lowers the standard of evidence required to determine guilt in campus sexual assault cases, and it relies on a single, shoddy study in order to justify its procedural changes. The bill is a pet project of the White House, and Will charges that "by co-sponsoring S. 590, Rubio is helping the administration sacrifice a core constitutional value, due process, in order to advance progressives' cultural aggression."
None of this, I think it's safe to say, is quite as revealing or notable as Rubio's water-drinking habits or his experiment with illegal teenage park-going, but it may provide some filler for serious Rubio completists wishing to gather a fuller picture of the candidate.
