On the Jansing and Company on MSNBC an interesting exchange came up. The subject was Marco Rubio and the current issue he is having with when his parents immigrated to the United States. In his campaign ads and in his narrative, he said he is the son of Cuban exiles. The wording is important because the implication is his family left Cuba because of Castro. In the official records, which were researched by the Washington Post, his mother and father actually left Cuba two years before Castro came into power.

The two year gap has become something of a political firestorm with the pundits, because the implication is Rubio, or Rubio’s parents, lied about the reason why they came to America. It’s the difference between being political exiles or economic exiles. It was pointed out on another MSNBC show that if his family left as economic exiles, then they would be like most immigrants to America and the narrative of his story isn’t special.

What was fascinating about watching the Jansing program was there was a reporter from Telemundo on, and while the MSNBC regular reporters were trying to imply this was a serious blow to Rubio, the Telemundo reporter was trying to convey that using all the energies trying to catch Rubio in this ‘gotcha’ moment was small potatoes compared to the more egregious parts of his record, such as his opposition to the Dream Act or immigration reform. The more he tried to turn the focus on the larger issues of Rubio’s record, the more the other reporters seemed to dig in their heels and focus on the incorrect facts of his narrative.

I did a very quick Wikipedia search and it gave me all the information I needed to see how silly this gotcha report was. Rubio’s parents fled Cuba in the late 50s around the time Castro took power or two years before that. Marco Rubio was born in 1971; over a decade after Castro was in power. So there was no way on God’s green Earth he would have any personal knowledge of the events first hand because he wasn’t even a thought in his parent’s eyes at the time they left Cuba. I know the argument could be made he should have checked the facts about when his parents left Cuba if it was going to play such a major role in his political biography, but step back for a moment and seriously think about this. If you had sat around the dinner table since you were a kid and were told your parents left Cuba because of Castro, are you going for verification? Are you going to think, when you are an adult, that your parents would embellish this information?

Like the reporter from Telemundo said, not many people know the exact particulars of their parents if they are immigrants, such as the day and time of their arrival in America. Even if the parents told them something, would many people bother to check the information their parents gave them? While watching other shows throughout the day, where the subject of Rubio was brought up and there wasn’t a Telemundo or Hispanic counterbalance, the focus was squarely on when and how is parents got to America, something he clearly had no control over, and not on his record.