Look, I don’t know what in the fuck about T-Bone or whether Cory Booker made the shit up. But Cory Booker has a 35 point lead in the polls, and that probably underestimates his advantage. If the National Review thinks that they are going to turn that around by calling into question a story that Booker started telling fifteen years ago, then we have nothing to worry about from the National Review.
We can start with Booker’s defense.
Newark mayor Cory Booker isn’t backing down from his insistence that the drug dealer T-Bone, whom he told several audiences in emotional stump speeches prior to 2008 had threatened his life before befriending him, is real. Not only that, Booker told NJTV’s Michael Aron, but T-Bone was merely one of “literally hundreds” of drug dealers to whom he has lent a hand while living in Newark. Some of them, he says, were even temporary roommates…
To put this in perspective, back in 1998 when Booker supposedly knew a drug-dealer named T-Bone, he went on a 10-day hunger strike, lived in a tent and then a trailer in the open-air drug sale areas of the Newark in order to bring attention to the problem. When accused of fabricating a story about knowing a drug dealer, he defends himself by saying that he knows hundreds of them and even invited some to be his roommates. The Republicans aren’t undermining his credibility; they’re giving him an opportunity to bolster his brand. There isn’t a Mary Magdalene that Booker isn’t ready to befriend. He’ll pull you out of a burning building. He’ll shovel your aging father’s sidewalk. If you lose power in a storm, he’ll invite you to sleep on his floor. Got a problem? Send him a Tweet and he’ll gladly don his cape.
Why even try to fuck with him? Star high school football player wins scholarship to Stanford and becomes class president. A Rhodes Scholar with honors. A Yale law degree. Then he pitches a tent in the middle of the most crime-riddled part of Newark and goes on a hunger strike to protest what’s going on with the have-nots. Somehow wins a seat on the city council and becomes the mayor. Then wins the nomination of the Democratic Party for a U.S. Senate seat.
And you want to quibble about the literal veracity of a story about some guy named T-Bone? This guy can tell you a thousand stories about people with different names, like all the people he met at Stanford, Oxford, and Yale who are too busy cashing in to notice what is going on in our inner cities.
So, there are a lot of Cory Booker critics who can fuck off. On the right and the left.
He’s not above criticism, but in a lot of ways he is without peer.
