title:  Here’s What Rubio REALLY Said In That Viral Video Where Cruz’s Team Claims He Bashed The Bible (VIDEO)
text: How fanatical is the Republican Party in 2016? Even Marco Rubio is being painted as an atheist.While Donald Trump maintains a huge lead over his competitors, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are shooting for second place   and things are getting nastier by the minute. In a particularly egregious   albeit not surprising   bit of mudslinging, Cruz s campaign spread an outrageous video they claimed showed Rubio telling a Cruz campaign staffer that he hated the Bible. That s right, Marco  I could look a rape victim in the eye and tell them not to have an abortion  Rubio hates God. Or so Cruz s team would have you believe.The video, released by the right-leaning politics section of the The Daily Pennsylvania, captures a candid moment between Rubio and one of Cruz s campaign staffers named Christian Collins. Rubio walks by Collins, seated next to Cruz s (batshit insane) father, Rafael Cruz, and reportedly pointed to a bible Collins was reading, telling him  Not many answers in it.  The Daily Pennsylvania even helpfully provides captions for this exchange so you can comfortably ignore the fact that this was absolutely not what Rubio said.Many news outlets ran the story without even a hint of skepticism. Gawker framed it as Marco Rubio  trying to talk smack.  But if you listen to the audio and ignore what the captions are telling you Rubio is saying, the conversation seems much less hostile. In fact, Rubio appears to be trying to bond with the Cruz staffer over their shared love of the Bible.Listening to just the audio, Rubio clearly says: Got a good book there? Every answer is in there. Especially in that one. That interpretation would make sense because Marco Rubio is a religious fundamentalist who, like many Republicans, believes God has ordained him to become president. His stance on things like gay marriage and abortion are derived from his literalist reading of the Bible. He really believes that  every answer is in there.  The idea that Rubio decided to out himself as an atheist to a random Cruz staffer and Cruz s dad, thereby effectively ending his own campaign, is so ludicrous that only a particularly dim Cruz fan would be gullible enough to actually buy it.Many of them did. Some with a splash of anti-Catholic bigotry.Despite the logical leaps, Cruz s campaign limply tried to spread this rumor as well. Why waste the moment, right? It was painful to watch. Here s Rick Tyler, a Cruz staffer, tweeting a link to the  Rubio hates God  story.What better way to shed that stigma of running a dishonest campaign than to push a story that Rubio hates the Bible. pic.twitter.com/nVzXPFG3j0  Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) February 21, 2016Almost immediately, the  higher ups  in the Cruz campaign realized this story was a disaster in the making. They were okay when Cruz suggested Trump would abolish the Second Amendment. They were okay when Cruz told Iowans that Ben Carson had dropped out of the race on the night of the caucus. They were not okay with selling a narrative that Marco Rubio was an atheist.Cruz campaign, at the highest levels, tell me that this was a horrible media baited situation (my words). They confirm Rubio praised Bible.  Ali A. Akbar (@ali) February 21, 2016Cruz s campaign has since frantically walked back its initial jabs at Rubio, but it s clear that this represents a defining pivot for the race. Cruz, already perhaps the most underhanded candidate in modern politics, is just chomping at the bit to pounce on Rubio, his closest competitor. He is particularly interested in going after Rubio s faith, because Cruz s entire candidacy relies on appealing to the Christian Right. It s only reasonable to suspect Cruz will continue to remind his evangelical followers of Rubio s Catholicism and, if he can get away with it, his  atheism. Featured image via YouTube screengrab 