Rubio would shut down wherever Muslims assemble, undo Cuba, Iran relations, start more war
Matthew Yglesias at Vox says he fears Rubio more than Trump, given his extreme positions.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Rubio has proposed a tax cut that will reduce federal revenue by $6.8 trillion over 10 years. Numbers that large don’t mean anything to people, so for comparison’s sake let’s say that if we entirely eliminated American military spending over that period we still couldn’t quite pay for it…
Rubio’s approach to world affairs essentially repeats the “let’s have it all and who cares if it adds up” mentality of his fiscal policy. His solution to every problem is to confront some foreign country more aggressively, with no regard to the idea of trade-offs or tensions between goals or limits to how much the United States can bite off at any particular time.
He’d start things off by alienating Latin American allies by undoing the Obama administration’s normalization of relations with Cuba in order to return to a decades-long failed policy of isolation.
But that’s small potatoes compared with the consequences of Rubio’s pledge to cancel the nuclear deal with Iran on day one. He isn’t too worried that this will lead to Iran building a nuclear weapon because there will be a “credible threat of military force if Iran decides to ramp up its program.” He also wants to deploy more American troops to Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS…
But while Rubio clearly didn’t get into the race to push these issues, his response to Trump’s rise has been telling and alarming. After the Paris attacks, Trump vowed to shut down mosques where radical preaching might be taking place; Rubio said that didn’t go far enough and that a Rubio administration would be willing to stamp out Muslims’ freedom of assembly wherever it might present itself…
Under pressure from Ted Cruz, Rubio is now promising to start deporting DREAMers as soon as he takes office. He’s even turned a wink-nudge promise to bring back torture as an instrument of government policy into an applause line in debates and on the stump.
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