The inflated balloon
By Varela
I’m reading the paper while my son sits beside me, doing homework. Suddenly, he asks:
–“Dad, are there honest politicians?”
I reply (to get him off my back):
–“Yes, there are.”
He insists:
–“And do honest politicians go to heaven after they die?”
Now I decide to answer him seriously.
–“No, they’re placed in a museum.”
When I read that Marco Rubio, our pampered right-wing child in Tallahassee, has used the credit card belonging to the Florida GOP to pay for personal expenses and has been forced to refund $3,000 to you and me (the taxpayers who pay for his supper), I think that he won’t go to a museum but to a store of party goods for kids’ birthday parties, where clown dolls are on display and inflated balloons are ready for sale.
Supposedly, every balloon is inflated by someone, but Marco Rubio, our conservative Republicans’ latest mini-star, inflates himself. Now that he’s campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate, he’s inflating himself even more.
For example, Marco published a manual for the state’s idiots that he titled “One Hundred Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future.” They say he had more ideas (something like a thousand) but his editors decided to delete “how to make a barbecue with rented meat, lent beer, and the neighbor’s wife,” “to avoid the homeless, let’s eliminate the homes,” and “the first thing we must do about terrorism is to erase the word ‘terror’ from the dictionary.” Profound rhetoric; very hard to understand.
Although Rubio said he discovered warm water and goldfish, what he really did was to recycle laws already used or vetoed and ideas that came to him during his high school parties with ethanol-loaded drinks.
One of the ideas, to reduce government, is the eternal theorem used by every Republican to award contracts to the private firms of friends. But Rubio comes up with it in Florida with the help of his constant friend, the ultra-rightist sycophant David Rivera, who, I am told, helped him write the book or print the cover, I’m not sure which.
It also occurred to Rubio that drivers could pay highway tolls for the next 12 months and their car registration for several years in advance. In other words, Marco wants to reduce the government but increase its supply of funds right away. I suppose he means to raise the salaries of all his friends before the drivers switch cars or the highway tolls go up.
Another innovation by Marco the Genius was proposing that a homeowner can reduce or expand the deductible of his hurricane-insurance policy according to circumstances. That’s wonderful. That law, in the state that’s worst afflicted by storms, should be framed on every homeowner’s wall.
Except that Florida is the state where you pay the most for catastrophe and flood insurance and if you change your mind before your first contract expires, the insurer will amend the policy: if you reduce the deductible, they will raise your monthly payment. If you increase the deductible, they will reduce the monthly payment. It’s obvious, but not by the same percentage.
The ideas for the laws conceived by “the right-wing Obama” are contradicted with technical mirages and optical illusions in the search for votes; they’re written not to be believed but to add up to one hundred. A nice, round number. Well, after much work as speaker of the Florida House, Rubio has turned into law maybe 20 ideas, but, in the campaign slogans against Governor Charlie Crist, he says 57 of his brilliant ideas have become laws. As long as the balloon doesn’t burst, he continues to inflate.
The truth is that his demagoguery cannot withstand serious scrutiny. For example, in speeches greeted with applause and standing ovation, he says the 2010 vote will be decisive in the U.S.A. If the voter fails (i.e., if he doesn’t vote for Rubio) the Apocalypse will come and there will be no turning back. We’ll be lost forever. This year, 2010, is our last chance to save ourselves, as a civilization.
He doesn’t talk about global warming but, metaphorically, about our identity as a nation. The listener can’t understand if a deluge or lava is on its way but can understand that without Rubio there’s no future. He reaffirms his message in the style of Obama 2008, who didn’t say he was a real black man but that his mother was white and his father a Kenyan. Rubio says his father sold coffee on the streets of Havana and that his grandfather smoked three cigars per day. At that point, his Hispanic audience removes their glasses and dry their eyes with handkerchiefs.
From the speaker’s rostrum, Rubio suggests that the Al-Qaeda leadership be captured as they gather around a candle in their cave and be taken in chains to Guantanamo to be tortured (the euphemism he uses is “to obtain information”) and taken before a rigid and vertical military tribunal.
Of course, the women in his audience fall into a trance when they hear his burst of machismo and the rest of the spectators, frenzied, whistle and raise their fists. If there is Ku-Klux-Klansman in the audience, he will remove his hood in a gesture of patriotic dignity.
Anyway, Rubio has even been mentioned as a national leader. Our Miami press, reflecting the rumors from the domino park on Calle Ocho, points to him not only as a future senator from Florida but also as a candidate for the U.S. presidency in 2016, defeating any Republican opponent he may have, be it the Afro-American opportunist Michael Steele, the evangelist Mitt Romney, the dilettante Sarah Palin, or John (“Rambo”) McCain, Part II.
My concern is that, because all balloons deflate, Marco Rubio could suffer the biggest blow of his life, because the higher they rise, the harder they fall.
Born in Cuba in 1955, José Varela has been an editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years. His artwork has appeared in the magazine Exito (1991-1997) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). A publicist and television writer, he is a member of the Progreso Weekly team.
