The NYT’s latest Rubio ‘scoop’ lamer than the first
First, Rubio was a traffic menace. Now, he owns a small fishing boat. The horror!
Last week, the New York Times dropped the lamest “hit” piece in the history of hit pieces. Pretending a few traffic tickets from the 90s made Sen. Rubio and his wife unfit for public service, the NYT ended up the butt of the joke.
On social media, #rubiocrimespree trending nationally for hours with submissions like, “drank milk after it expired,” and “Didn’t read Apple End User Licence [sic] Agreement but still clicked “I Agree”.” Rubio’s campaign got in on the fun, and celebrities publicly declared the NYT story dumb.
Apparently that wasn’t enough embarrassment for the NYT. Tuesday, the NYT released yet another ‘scoop’ on the good Senator from Florida. This time, the NYT suggested that Rubio had financial problems which have tainted his career.
Those “financial problems”? “Student debt, mortgages and an extra loan against the value of his home totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The NYT wrote:
But in 2012, financial salvation seemed to have arrived: A publisher paid him $800,000 to write a book about growing up as the son of Cuban immigrants.
In speeches, Mr. Rubio, a Florida Republican, spoke of his prudent plan for using the cash to finally pay off his law school loans, expressing relief that he no longer owed “a lady named Sallie Mae,” as he once called the lender.
But at the same time, he splurged on an extravagant purchase: $80,000 for a luxury speedboat, state records show. At the time, Mr. Rubio confided to a friend that it was a potentially inadvisable outlay that he could not resist. The 24-foot boat, he said, fulfilled a dream.
The idiocy of asserting Rubio is a hypocrite for using earned income to pay off debt aside, that whole speedboat thing? Yeah. Not a luxury speedboat. Not by a long shot.
Rubio's luxury speedboat….is a fishing boat. http://t.co/Vc5k6jamII pic.twitter.com/jnz7nKSjLa
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) June 9, 2015
Politico’s Dylan Byers dug into the NYT claim that Rubio purchased luxury speedboat.
…while Rubio did indeed spend $80,000 on a boat, the vessel in question is not the glamorous “luxury speedboat” the Times article portrayed. It is, in fact, an offshore fishing boat.
On Tuesday, Rubio spokesperson Alex Conant sent POLITICO a link to a website showing the make and model of the boat Rubio owns: an EdgeWater 245CC Deep-V Center Console. The manufacturer, Edgewater, notes that the boat is perfect for “safety-minded family boaters and avid anglers.” In a place like Miami, home to billionaires and stars who have multimillion-dollar yachts, an “$80,000 luxury boat” can seem like a contradiction.
Rubio’s campaign said his boat purchase included two new 150-horsepower 4-stroke Yamaha engines, a relatively standard amount of horsepower. According to eBay, each engine could cost as much as $16,000 – making the value of the boat hull itself less than $80,000.
Basically, man lives in Florida owns a boat — that’s the scandal here.
But the NYT didn’t stop there:
Other moves seemed simply unwise: A few weeks ago, he disclosed that he had liquidated a $68,000 retirement account, a move that is widely discouraged by financial experts and which probably cost him about $24,000 in taxes and penalties.
In the past week, he suffered a new loss when he sold his second home in Florida’s capital, Tallahassee, for $18,000 less than he and a friend paid for it a decade ago. The house had previously faced foreclosure after Mr. Rubio and his friend failed to make mortgage payments for five months.
These were not isolated incidents. A review of the Rubio family’s finances — including many new documents — reveals a series of decisions over the past 15 years that experts called imprudent: significant debts; a penchant to spend heavily on luxury items like the boat and the lease of a $50,000 2015 Audi Q7; a strikingly low savings rate, even when Mr. Rubio was earning large sums; and inattentive accounting that led to years of unpaid local government fees.
A LOW SAVINGS RATE?! I can’t even.
Something about the Rubios has the NYT severely rattled. It seems the only logical explanation for this string of articles. If only the NYT were even a fraction as judicious about the Clinton Foundation as they have been about Rubio’s past…
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Comments
Someone please put the “New York Times” out of its misery.
They’re clearly out of time.
Such as buying them and their parent company up and shutting them down for good!
This is a vast left-wing conspiracy to make me like Rubio.
Well at least he has the right enemies.
Why is the New York Times being so clearly racist to Rubio????
What they are doing is clearly “bullying” and they have established a documented pattern of their bullying!
Snark Snark
Well at least he has the right enemies.
I’d wager Hillary’s internal polling data shows Rubio as a genuine threat who needs to be neutralized — and her toadies at the Times dutifully comply.
Exactly. But that bucket the NYT is using to carry Hillary’s water is looking a little leaky.
I heard the NYT also reported that at his State of the Union response Rubio drank two small bottles of water, instead of one regular size bottle.
What a waste of plastic! Were he in California, we’d report him to the governor.
Yeah, a lot of my rural Texas working-class neighbors own such “luxury speed boats” that they drag behind pick-ups that cost most of what the boat costs, and they drive every stinking day. They can be seen on I-45 on weekends, headed to the coast for a few days of fishing on their days off at the plant or job site.
Outrageous.
I have one at my little dock. 21′ deck boat, 15 years old. It cost way up there in the thousands, which apparently makes me too elite to understand all you little people.
You missed what I think is the best part. NYT also contacted a “financial adviser” who told them buying the boat was “irresponsible” – spending 10% of his windfall, after paying off his debts, on family recreation is irresponsible.
The completely objective and randomly selected “financial adviser” was an Obama donor.
It’s almost as if NYT can barely be bothered to transcribe the wild tales American Bridge sends them anymore.
I get the speed boat.
Any self respecting Cuban who fled to the U.S. at some time or another has dreamt of having a “speed boat” that wasn’t likely to sink.
I was going to overlook Rubio’s immigration bullshit, but this? I’m sorry, but no. He lives in Florida and owns a boat for some reason. That’s like owning snow skis in Colorado or something. That’s it. I’m done with Rubio.
Or those clowns in Minn-e-soooo-da who own snowmobiles or ice fishing shacks. I mean, who these people think they are? I gawd, the extravagance…!!!
Rubio has otehr retirement accounts, and he wanted ready access to cash for his Presidential campaign, but you think he could find other things, or postpone the moment iof decision given the penalty. The New York Times said he had money in checking and savings accounts.
Rubio doesn’t need to save for his retirement–he will get a Congressional pension.
The NYT also missed the fact that the boat also looks almost exactly like the one Dexter, who also lives in Florida, uses to dump bodies.
It’s settled. Rubio is a psychopathic serial killer.
The boat also looks like the ones Colombian drug smugglers use.
I bet Rubio has been chased around Miami by a couple of pastel wearing, Ferrari Daytona driving detectives named Crockett & Tubbs!
Be kind. The NYT is trying to rise to the level of the National Enquirer. It’s hard work for them.
n y slimes = pravda on the hudson
If Marco is half the investor Hillary is, the boat will be worth at least $4,000,000 shortly. Her $1,000 turned into $99,537. NYT and their “adviser” were justifiably proud of her.
And remember those beautiful Donzis and Scarabs the Bushes ran around in up at Kennebunkport. What a rotten investment.
And Romney zipping around with 13 grandkids in the bow of his New Hampshire boat up on Winnipesaukee. What a waste of good investment capital. Unwise according to any good “financial adviser”
But, Marco, a stinkin’ fishing boat…..yikes
An $80K boat in Florida barely qualifies for the Redneck Yacht Club.
Jeb Bush is the media’s ‘designated loser.’ He’s the one Hillary wants to fight against because he’s big Establishment and will turn off conservatives and will turn off anyone tired of Bush.
But Marco Rubio is also from Florida and he directly challenges Jeb in the same waters that Jeb swims in – Florida.
Florida is one of the big swing state battlegrounds. If Jeb can’t win Florida, then what good is he?
So if the media wants to end up with Jeb on top, they have to take out Rubio in a hurry.
Rubio has his own immigration-related flaws with the conservatives, but on charisma alone he’ll make Hillary look like a shriveled up moldy raisin.
As Rush likes to say, they will always show you who they are most afraid of by who they attack the hardest. Using that logic, they seem to be the most afraid of Rubio at the moment.
What we are seeing is the creation of a narrative. What that narrative is exactly I’m not sure. I think it is either that he is not good with money or that he exercises poor judgment, or both. For example, the first story was that he withdrew money from a retirement account prematurely, which can be interpreted as both bad judgment and bad with money. Next came the driving tickets, which can be both bad judgment and bad with money. Then came the story with the house, which they think may have been bigger than he could afford. Now the “$80,000 luxury speedboat”.
They think Rubio is the biggest threat and they think they can turn his judgment and/or his finances into his greatest weakness. At least that seems to be the narrative they are creating.
Expect more. They are probably sitting on the most damaging story. Waiting to release it when it can do the most damage several months from now.
“They are probably sitting on the most damaging story.”
Probably something about the endangered fish he caught on his luxury boat….the guy’s a menace!
They are probably sitting on the most damaging story.
Well, with the buildup they’re working on, it had better be a dilly. Something on the order of “Rubio dodges taxes on salaries he pays to illegals to rip the ‘Do Not Remove’ tags off his mattresses”.
That’s silly. They attack whoever they get something on, when they get it.
These stories are all being fed to NYT by America Bridge, the pro-Hillary propaganda group funded by Soros and run by David Brock. And by the stories against Rubio and Jeb so far – completely false – they are finding nothing of use against anyone.
NYT v Rubio. Clown fight! Film at 11!
I’m hard-pressed to believe 1,000 different Dem/Lib boiler rooms haven’t already oppo researched Rubio to death, just like Walker.
Any withheld till later scandal would have to be recent and really, really big – the sort of thing that, if true, Republicans dump him themselves.
I don’t see that happening.
However, the NYT is usually quite expert at dishing the dirt on Republican candidates and these two recent efforts – 4 traffic tickets and a boat – are absurd. No way the NYT is not aware of that. So, what are they up to?
I think they’re pretending it’s inadvertant that they’re making Rubio look very much like an every day American. I think they’re sending a message, but to whom?
Well, to Hillary Clinton, ya dumbass. The NYT wants another true young turk liberal like Obama, not some sail-shifting con artist harpy grandma with the charisma of a rutabaga and the populist touch of a running chainsaw.
“not some sail-shifting con artist harpy grandma with the charisma of a rutabaga and the populist touch of a running chainsaw”
I have to remember that. You should copyright
It’s copyrighted the minute I write it. But you’re right, maybe I should register my copyright. Thanks, though!
Right, in order to sit on a scandal story and hold it is well beyond most reporters, editors, and political operatives. AFAIK, it’s only been done successfully one time: the 2000 late break of GWB’s drunk driving arrest 30 years earlier.
Whoever had it managed to keep it under wraps until the weekend before the Election. Between that and Bush’ ill-advised attempt to win California by diverting resources from Florida and elsewhere, it made it close when it should never have been.
But who else can do that? And it is not wise, like a coach who loses the game at the end, but has timeouts he didn’t use.
I actually saw some liberal commenters say this hit piece made Rubio seem more relatable to them. After seeing his finances, they felt he COULD understand the finances of average Americans.
The new “latest” is his “luxury” home – in an upper-middle subdivision cul-de-sac, it does have a swimming pool in-ground, but is otherwise unremarkable. Not even big for four kids.
I own three boats, so I must be really irresponsible. Also, I heard Rubio doesn’t practice catch and release.
Wait until the Slimes finds out that Marco Rubio sported a mullet when he was in high school.
Next week the NYT will have a hit piece that Rubio and his family flew on a “Private Jet” to Europe last year that is not even American. Of course, the “Private Jet” is an Airbus owned by Delta. Hey, but let’s not have the facts get in the way!
Meanwhile, Hillary, with her hundred million dollar bank account, her multiple homes and mortgages and the fact she probably hasn’t driven a car in decades stands for and identifies with “the little guy” And to think there are people stupid enough to believe this……
The communist have NYT control. Obama has traffic ticket too, but the NYT never said nothing.
Obama Pays Parking Tickets 17 Years Late.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/08/AR2007030800553.html
Holy shit. The Daily Beast just reported than Ted Cruz owns a pickup truck, a NEW pickup truck.
Next thing you know, we’ll find out Scott Walker wears $300 suits.
John Forbes Kerry was unavailable for comment.