American politics is a fickle bitch. One day you're Marco Rubio, Tea Party pretty boy and front-runner for the Republican vice presidential nomination. The next day, you're just an asshole who distorted his family history to play on the sympathy of constituents, including fellow Cuban-Americans.

According to documents unearthed by birthers earlier this week, Rubio isn't actually the "son of exiles" he claims to be. His parents came to the United States in 1956 -- nearly three years before Castro came to power.

So much for transparency, Marco.



The quasi scandal began earlier this week when birthers once again began grumbling about Rubio's qualifications for the presidency.

Yesterday morning, The St. Petersburg Times checked out the claims of Charles Kerchner, a birther who said nationalization records showed that Rubio's parents arrived in the U.S. in 1956 -- not 1959 as Rubio has often stated.

Rubio's own Senate biography says that his parents, Mario and Oriales Rubio, "came to America following Fidel Castro's takeover" -- meaning 1959 at the earliest.

The Washington Post quickly picked-up on the snafu in a scathing article:

...the 40-year-old senator with the boyish smile and prom-king good looks has drawn on the power of that claim to entrance audiences captivated by the rhetorical skills of one of the more dynamic stump speakers in modern American politics. The real story of his parents' migration appears to be a more conventional immigrant narrative, a couple who came to the United States seeking a better life. In the year they arrived in Florida, the future Marxist dictator was in Mexico plotting a quixotic return to Cuba.

Of course, we reported more than a year ago that Rubio's shit wasn't as unstinky as he claimed. He's a world-class opportunist whose fiscal conservatism is a facade. But we didn't see this coming.

Rubio admitted to the Post that his parents arrived in 1956, but then fell back on some very un-vice-presidential excuses for his mistake.

"I'm going off the oral history of my family," he said. "All of these documents and passports are not things that I carried around with me."

Yeah, right. Any self-respecting cubano sure as hell knows when his or her family arrived in the United States. Heck, most can tell you the exact day.

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