In an interview with GQ Magazine, rising GOP star and possible 2016 presidential candidate, Marco Rubio, revealed just how terrified Republican politicians still are of Bible Belt Christians. In a rather abrupt, yet simplistic way of getting to the core of Rubio’s level of religiosity, the interviewer asked him how old he thinks the earth is. With a bizarre, rambling response, Rubio suggested that he was not equipped to answer the question because he is “not a scientist” and went on to say that there are “multiple theories out there on how the universe was created.” Really?
For a moment, let’s take cautious comfort in the likelihood that a man of Rubio’s age and education wouldn’t feel too much conflict if a geologist told him that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. But if the opposite is true, it raises the question of what it would mean to have a potential president employ such infantile lengths to dodge a question that’s based in known scientific fact. A simple pass on the question with the stated intent of not wanting to alienate people of faith would have sufficed. But instead, Rubio’s instinct was to stupidly pontificate on the “mysteries” of the earth’s age, throwing his party back on the griddle of ridicule.
Unfortunately for Rubio, religious fanatics are still front and center in today’s politics, and nutbags with a room-temperature IQ like Bryan Fischer (see video below) will always be there to speak for him and clarify his comments.
Conservative pundits are turning on Romney in droves (see video below) after he was once again recorded making comments that seemed to diminish certain demographics of the American electorate. After two election cycles of campaigning from the fringe, the GOP’s self-analysis that has emerged from the last few weeks has been nothing less than astounding, with thundering rebukes of social conservatives and the class warfare rhetoric that was a symptom of Romney’s initial dismissal of America’s “47 percent”.
If the GOP had this remarkable insight early on, could Romney have won the election? Could they even have seen what was coming, given the misleading polling and disinformation emanating from the “conservative media complex”? Is this the beginning of the death of the social conservative movement and the rise of the moderates should Obama fail in his second term?
