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.
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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