Marco Rubio, almost down to zero in the polls, is trying to find ways to remain relevant in this presidential race.  He is criticizing Donald Trump's motto, "Make America Great Again," saying it disparages America and says that we are not great.

In a campaign stop here in Northern Nevada on Tuesday, Mr. Rubio insisted that Mr. Trump’s claim implied that America wasn’t great, when he said nothing could be further from the truth.

“I would remind everyone America is great,” Mr. Rubio continued. “There’s no nation on earth I would trade places with. There’s no other country I would rather be. The issue is not that we’re not great. The issue is whether we will remain great. The issue is, we can be even greater than we are now. We can be even more prosperous, more powerful.”

Who cares about mottos?  I do.  Words have meaning.

In this case, Rubio is shooting totally off the mark.  When we talk about "America," we may be talking about the American people.  But in the context of a political campaign, when we talk about "America," we are often talking about the American government.  That, very clearly, is what Donald Trump was talking about.  No one can believe that Trump is saying the American people are not great.  By pretending that this was Trump's meaning, Rubio looks disingenuous. (He also looks a little desperate.)

Trump is correct when he implies that the American government, right now, is certainly not great.  A great government does not:

1) Force teenage girls to undress in front of poorly disguised boys;

2) Subsidize the killing of babies and the harvesting of their body parts;

3) Protect a rogue country with a death cult ideology that is developing nuclear weapons;

4) Nationalize our health care system;

5) Water down citizenship by legalizing millions of illegal immigrants;

6) Take powers onto itself not permitted in the Constitution;

7) Refuse to secure our borders.

And so on and so on.  If Rubio wants to criticize Trump, there are certainly grounds to do it – Trump has spent nearly his entire adult life as a liberal Democrat.  But picking this as an attack line is almost as bad as trying to look tough on border security by building a fence with Canada.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.