File under: Upon This Schlock I Will Build My Church
Anyone outside of the Beltway Common Wisdom terrarium has been able to see for a long time that Marco Rubio is kind of an idiot. Yes, he is a re-programmable idiot, with nice hair and an attractive family which makes him very useful. But as Brother Charlie Pierce has noted many times, Young Marco is never more than one coding glitch away from tumbling into the deep and dark Forest of Infinite Rakes. For a truly hilarious example of Young Marco getting locked into a recursive dumbass coding loop I would refer you back to the Year of Our Lord 2012, when Young Marco went on the Daily Show. I theorize that, perhaps sensing danger, some enterprising staffer decided to set the Rubio Emergency Default Answer = "Both Sides".
Sadly that enterprising staffer was also a shitty programmer who took no precaution against the possibility that Jon Stewart might ask more than one question that would trigger the Rubio Emergency Default Answer. What ensued was possibly the first recorded example of a politician failing a Turing test (despite a million angry emails, the embed code Comedy Central uses still auto-starts all videos, which I hate, so here is a link to the video if you want to see it, and here is some of what I wrote about it back in 2012):
In case you missed Jon Stewart's award-verging "interview" with Marco Rubio, here is your rush transcript of Senator Rubio's answer to Jon Stewart every single time Mr. Stewart tried very respectfully to point out that Senator Rubio was, um, lying, and that the relentless, pathological obstructiveness of the Republican Party was unmatched by anything Democrats have done in modern history.
"Both sides..."
"Well, you know, both sides..."
"Both Democrats and Republicans..."
"That's just politics..."
"The Democrats left us no choice..."
"Both sides..."
"Democrats and Republicans..."
"Both sides..."
"Both Democrats and Republicans..."
And so forth, to the point of being comical...
But Trump is a braying disaster, and Cruz is a cartoon supervillain that scares little children, and Jeb(!) it practically wearing a red shirt and begging the Klingons to put him out of his misery. Which means Young Marco is all the GOP establishment has: thanks to a 30 year winnowing process of dumbing the GOP base down and angrying them up to the point that no sane person has a hope in Hell of winning the Republican nomination, Young Marco has become the Rock chosen by Thomas Hobson himself on which the GOP establishment must now put up some kinda Church,
And so, by God and Saint Ronnie, they are going to grab their go-go-booted little cipher by the scruff of his neck and drag him bodily around the clubhouse turn if that's what it takes to keep him in contention until they can figure out how undumbify the wingnuts just enough to lose their adoration of the billionaire with the hot wife who promises to make them all winners again.
Which is where the inexplicably-still-employed Hugh Hewitt comes in... (h/t Heather)
...because when you create a media marketplace which makes it clear that no Conservative hucksters and frauds will ever be held accountable for anything they say or do, Hugh Hewitt is the kind of "journalist" you end up with.
excerpted from Driftglass.