It's still not entirely clear what story offended poor Marco's sensibilities so much. Some speculated he was castigating an Annapolis Capital Gazette reporter who dropped an F-bomb on TV after five of her co-workers were shot to death, but Rubio has pushed back against that rumor and claimed to the Miami Herald that he was instead referring to a slightly more innocuous F-word quoted in a recent Axios story.
No matter the actual impetus for Rubio's tweet, it's painfully dumb. (Also, Rubio has repeatedly talked about how much he loves Tupac Shakur and other old-school hip-hop, which makes his complaint about cursing all the more incongruous.)Sign of our times... the F word is now routinely used in news stories, tweets etc It’s not even F*** anymore. Who made that decision???
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) June 29, 2018
In fact, Rubio last week ranted angrily about media bias — and then capped it off with a groan-inducing call for journalistic civility in an era when people like Rubio are trying to take away people's health care and cut the social safety net down to nothing. Frankly, the only response to many of Marco Rubio's own policy positions is to promptly tell him to go fuck himself. Here are some of those positions:
1. He's spent years trying to take health insurance away from as many as 30 million people. Rubio said in 2017 that he would have supported a full Obamacare repeal without any replacement plan. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that would wind up stripping health insurance from 30 million people. And that was far from Rubio's first attack on the Affordable Care Act: In 2015, the New York Times reported that Rubio had almost singlehandedly worked behind the scenes for two years to "quietly undermine" the ACA and basically scare insurance companies away from supporting the program. Sure, Obamacare doesn't work that well, but it's far better than the utter nightmare we lived under pre-ACA. Rubio, meanwhile, wants us to return to a world where even more people go into bankruptcy to pay medical bills, die because they can't afford regular checkups to catch diseases early, and can't afford life-altering procedures for kids, like prenatal care or regular medical advice. But at least he never said curse words!
2. Repeatedly trying to prevent LGBTQ Americans from obtaining basic rights. Rubio, a Good Christian Boy Who Does Not Swear, also does not believe same-sex marriage should be legal and fought for a long time against the idea. Even after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, Rubio said on the 2015 presidential campaign trail that he didn't think "any case law is settled law" and that he'd hope to appoint Supreme Court justices that would reverse gay-marriage decisions and undermine legal protections for transgender people as well. The pro-LGBTQ Human Rights Campaign has called Rubio "consistently on the wrong side of equality."
After saying all this, Rubio used the Pulse Nightclub shooting, where 49 people attending an event for gay Latino men were killed, as a pretense for running for Senate again. Mere weeks after winning, he appeared at an event with anti-gay religious leaders.
3. Threatening to cut Social Security. As long as you don't curse, it's apparently fine to grind elderly, poor Americans into debt and poverty. After Rubio voted for the absolutely heinous Trump Tax Cut last year, he told a private group of lobbyists that the GOP would proceed next to "entitlement reform," which is not-even-hidden code for defunding and privatizing things like Medicaid, food stamps, and Social Security.
4. Stating he'd take away a woman's right to abortion even in cases of rape, medical emergency, or incest. PolitiFact rates this claim "mostly true." For no reason at all, we're just so happening to link this recent Harper's Bazaar story on why abortion bans wind up killing adult women.
5. Calling for regime change in Syria.
After Donald Trump randomly fired cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in 2017 (while eating chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago), Rubio spent the next few days on TV calling for the Trump Administration to remove Bashar al-Assad from power. Sure, Assad is a horrible person and a war criminal — but the last few times the U.S. took out a leader in the Arab world, it wound up creating ISIS in Iraq, killing anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million Iraqis, and destabilizing Libya to the point that open-air slave markets returned to the country. To Marco, it's civil to support bombing a nation as long as you don't utter any four-letter-words in the process.
6. Saying it was cool for Donald Trump to throw immigrant children in cages. Fuck you, man. Seriously.
