Steve Adubato , Robert Menendez and Cory Booker Interview a gold-plated love-in
What a gold-plated love-in. The statement made by Senator Menendez was in response to a direct question by Newark’s own, Steve Adubato, worded in exactly the same way as Menendez’s answer is reported as being. Menendez could simply have said “yes” and received the same reaction.
My reaction to this syrupy vignette is that Steve Adubato has to be the most frozen-in-time, fact-resistant, paleo-liberal, pitiable case of a journalist living and working in the Metro NY region who is actually still a well-meaning, non-scheming, and good-hearted person. With the way Adubato framed and worded the question, he teed the issue up for Menendez no less favorably than you might expect him to do if he were the Senator’s own chief of staff! Watch the video at the 25:00 mark and you’ll see Menendez’s eyes go wide at the prospect of hitting Adubato’s question into the next area code.
Oh, Steve, Steve, Steve…what are we to do with you? Where did we go wrong? How could you be so ideologically shackled as to fail to finally realize what is happening all around you? You are a man of full age, yet you have utterly failed to sharpen your approach. One cannot groove a fastball with the likes of Menendez like you just did and even hope to retain, much less burnish one’s professional reputation!
Come over to the dark side, Steve!!! You will learn that we are actually not the heart of darkness, but true children of the light. We struggle with our frailties, as all in the human condition must do. But we are clear in our sight, and in our thinking. If we are guilty of anything, it is merely trying to collectively blow out, one by one, the limitless supply of matches this arson of a so-called-president (and increasingly, the GOP-e) seems to have on hand. It can get tiring, and certainly seems and feels repetitive, but someone must do it if we are to come out the other end of this house of horrors in one piece.
Politically and intellectually speaking, the past seven years or so have been a hand-to-mouth existence for true constitutional conservatives who prize the civil society and traditional morality, as well as the federal and republican model of democratic government extended continent-wide, as conceived by the frail but brilliant James Madison in the face of so many historical examples of failed democracies over the millennia. We are now so regularly the object of abject, thought-free obloqy that it almost has no ill effect on us. The notion that we can live rent-free in the minds of an Obama, a Menendez ….an Aronsohn….keeps us moving forward.
Steve, you can do this. Do the deed. Make the switch. Make that light bulb to shine like the Sun. Peel yourself away from these charletans and breathe the clean air for once in your young life!!
