By now, all America knows that Sen. Marco Rubio reached for some water while delivering the GOP rebuttal to the president’s State of the Union. What we don’t yet know is what the press corps was drinking.
It must be something. How else to explain the Beltway overkill: CNN asking if it could be a “career ender”; Politico devoting at least five stories to it; MSNBC, by one tally, playing the tape 155 times?
You know you’re in trouble when National Public Radio makes sense. Part of the reason the Florida Republican’s water bottle generated so much coverage, admitted one NPR blogger, is that the moment was a “thrill” for Rubio opponents — like watching “the quarterback on the opposing team trip over his shoelaces.”
To put that in context, the same press corps so consumed by Rubio’s water is completely uninterested in why President Obama went MIA while the US consulate in Benghazi was under attack, why he would nominate as defense secretary a man who can’t string together a simple declarative sentence, not to mention the greatest laugh line of the evening: Obama’s claim that “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.”
Covering these issues will never get the easy yuks that Rubio’s water bottle did. Then again, isn’t that supposed to be the difference between a late-night comic and a member of the national press corps?