Cory Booker On GOP Claiming To Love Women: ‘Like Saying I Love Latinos, I Go To Taco Bell’

Cory Booker, the extremely popular Newark, New Jersey mayor, delivered an incredibly powerful and pointed speech in the early moments of the Democratic National Convention today, and hit home runs with statements like, “Being asked to pay your fair share isn’t class warfare, it’s patriotism,” and told the audience that the Democratic “platform is crafted by Democrats, but it is not about partisanship, it’s about pragmatism.”

Booker’s speech at the DNC will be remembered for decades to come, eliciting chants of “USA! USA! USA!,” with the audience springing into song, singing “God Bless America.”

Hours earlier at Planned Parenthood, Booker unleashed an epic response, delivering “a harsh criticism of speakers at the GOP convention who had said they ‘love women’,” the National Review noted. Booker, speaking about last week’s RNC convention, said:

“Then I heard something that is one of the reflections, an echo of some of the most insulting things we’ve been hearing for a long time,” Booker said, referring to watching the convention. “I heard people stand up and say, ‘I love women.’ I heard people stand up: ‘I’ve got a sister. I’ve got a mother.’”

“That’s like saying you’re not a bigot ’cause you have a black friend,” Booker retorted, drawing cheers and applause from the crowd. “That’s like saying I love Latinos, I go to Taco Bell every week. That is like saying that you are a person that is just and right because you know what, you like Jewish people.”

“But I’ll tell you what you say, you say it with your words,” he continued. “You say it with your lips. You preach it from on high. But when it comes to your actions, when it comes to your deeds, it comes to what you do every day, you are denigrating those very people you claim to love. And so I don’t understand how somebody can say they love women when they are denying women access to health care, when they are denying women strategies to protect their life, when they are implementing policies that undermine all the ground that we have gained,” he concluded, saying he was speaking not only about women’s progress, but also about the country’s progress.

“There’s some people in the Republican party that believe when they say all men are created equal, that they are leaving out women themselves,” Booker said later on in his remarks. “That’s not the nation we are.”