Florida's senior Senator is excoriating the State of the Union as delivered by President Joe Biden as providing abundant evidence of his age, infirmity and incapacity to serve.
"It was a proof of life speech. That's what it was. He said: 'I'm alive, and I'm able to give a speech that I can read off a teleprompter. I'm able to whisper, but mostly scream, and I'm able to say things that are really mean about the Republican Party and the Supreme Court. I can make claims that they're going to get rid of Social Security,'" Marco Rubio told Sean Hannity.
Biden's delivery was indeed closer to yelling than whispering, and that was a leitmotif of the Senator's interview comments on Fox News.
"The whole thing was weird. I was actually concerned for him. It was really strange," Rubio said.
"Here's the No. 1 problem: going into tonight, there were people in his own party that were really worried about him. Does he have the energy? Is he too old? Does he have the mental and physical stamina? So I think they told him he had to go in there and show energy, and to him, that meant, 'Let me scream like the guy that screams at you to get off his lawn.'"
Rubio went on to malign the President for his ongoing attempts to reckon with Israel's onslaught on Gaza, an ongoing attack justified by the Hamas attacks five months ago, noting that despite calls for a port for Gaza and a two-state solution, the hard left is still disenchanted with the President, as evidenced by protesters on the streets of Washington, D.C.
"Tonight, he almost didn't make it. I'm sure one of the reasons why he was late is he had these radical Hamas supporters, many of them key voters in the base of his party, that were blocking them from leaving the White House. They had to deal with those crazies. The images have been on television all afternoon. Just wait till the convention, when those crazies get there."
Political conventions have often had to deal with demonstrative elements, with the modern nadir being the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where violence marred the nomination of Hubert Humphrey and arguably helped Richard Nixon become President. More recently, "free speech zones" were used to corral disaffected attendees at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where John Kerry was nominated.
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