It’s crucial that Presidential candidates be carefully vetted by insiders. It’s just not prudent for the public to be allowed to support some flash-in-the-pan who has been in the public eye since the late 1970s. Instead, the Establishment assures us that respectable candidates like Marco Rubio come without any untoward baggage.

For example, consider the career of former Congressman David Rivera, who has been a close friend of Rubio’s since they were on Lincoln Diaz-Balart’s staff together 24 years ago. Rubio and Rivera bought a Florida house together as an investment property and they shared a house in Washington DC when Rubio was in the Senate and Rivera was enjoying his one term in the House. So, you can rest assured that there’s nothing sketchy about Rivera, whose nickname, according to his recently sentenced girlfriend, is “The Gangster.” He’s bonafide! (Granted, Rivera only spent one term in the House and when he tried to make a comeback in 2014, he only got 7% of the vote in what the National Journal called “the worst congressional comeback attempt of all time.”)

Rivera is like a character out of a Miami novel co-written by Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen. From Rivera’s Wikipedia page:

4 Controversies

On September 6, 2002, Rivera was involved in a traffic collision with a truck carrying thousands of fliers, produced by Rivera’s campaign opponent at the time, that included a last-minute attack on Rivera’s character and detailed past domestic violence accusations against him. According to reports filed by the Florida Highway Patrol, a car driven by Rivera hit the truck and forced it to the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway, ten minutes before the truck’s 6 p.m. deadline to deliver the fliers to the post office, preventing the fliers from being delivered in time to be mailed. Rivera has said that he had planned to meet up with the truck on an exit ramp off the Expressway so he could retrieve a batch of his own campaign fliers. The owner of the company that produced the anti-Rivera fliers maintains that the truck driver did not voluntarily pull off the highway. According to the FHP incident report, the collision occurred in the middle of the road.

Controversy 4.2 is particularly action-packed:Rivera is a take-charge guy. If a truck needs to be run off the road, he won’t make a calls to a guy he knows like a stereotypical crooked politician. No, he’ll jump in his car and ram the damn truck himself.

But that’s the point: Miami Diverse is America’s future, and the GOP deep thinkers intend to replicate Miami’s political culture nationwide, thus ensuring Dave Barry plenty of material deep into his dotage.