I've got to pose this question, folks: Does Jeb Bush really want to be president of the United States after all? Yesterday he says he'd leave the Immigration Proclamation in place, which suggests at the very least that he's running in the wrong party. But his motion-sickness inducing merry-go-round on Iraq has me thinking that he's just not up for a bid at all.
Two days ago the ex-Florida Governor sat down for a high-profile interview with Fox News Channel's Megyn Kelly (the same one at which he disastrously blurted the "I'd keep Obamnesty" gaffe) as part of a belated attempt to raise his profile, since early polls in primary States seem to indicate, shockingly, that the Republican nominating electorate has no taste or tolerance for a fifth Bush general election candidacy in eight election cycles, and smearing his smirking mug all over our TV screens would "persuade GOP voters over to my way of thinking".
And then he did something that actually won from me a measure of grudging respect: He said that he, too, like his big brother, would have done the right thing and ordered the invasion of Iraq - also like Hillary Clinton:
“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,” Bush said of the mission to topple Saddam Hussein. “And so would almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.”
Bush went on to concede that the pre-war intelligence was “faulty” and that his brother’s administration did not devote a satisfactory level of attention to securing the country. “By the way, guess who thinks that those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush,” Jeb Bush insisted. “Yes, I mean, so just for the news flash to the world, if they’re trying to find places where there’s big space between me and my brother, this might not be one of those.”
Of course, nobody has any real idea what the Ugly Dutchess would have done, including her. But this was a rather transparent attempt to tie Mrs. Clinton to her Senate vote in favor of authorizing the use of military force against Saddam Hussein, which is one more reason why she will not be the 2016 Democrat nominee. Maybe Jeb was thinking in terms of clearing the general election field before him, since he's running this "unannounced campaign" as though he's the presumptive frontrunner he hilariously isn't. Perhaps he was reasoning as well that as Dubya's brother, he'd get Iraq hung around his neck by the media anyway, so why not embrace it early and get it out of the way? Regardless, it was a ballsy thing to say, and seemed to me also calculated to grab GOP voters' attention and redirect it from his heretical pro-amnesty and pro-Common Core stances.
Naturally, Bush III drew a ton of heat for it from the usual media quarters, but they'll never do anything but try to destroy him anyway (once he's the GOP nominee), and he surely understands that, right?
So much for being another "cowboy":
Republican Jeb Bush said on Tuesday that "mistakes were made" in the Iraq war, moving to disavow a controversial statement he made in support of the 2003 invasion ordered by his brother, then-President George W. Bush....
Jeb Bush on Tuesday went on the talk radio show conducted by conservative Sean Hannity to try to quiet the controversy.
"I don't know what that decision would have been. That's a hypothetical," Bush said when asked by Hannity whether he would have ordered an invasion of Iraq....
Bush also said that he had misinterpreted the question that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly had posed to him in the interview. [emphasis added]
So forget the crucible of an international crisis (or multiple simultaneous crises) in which an American president has to make tough calls on decisions in which s/he will never have all the information and there are no good choices; Jeb Bush can't weather twenty-four hours of eminently and tiresomely predictable press gutter-sniping, and can't even own what he said - which was the right thing to say - and effectively blames the "misinterpretation" on his interviewer in as friendly a media setting as he's ever going to get.
I'll ask it again: Does Jeb Bush really want to be POTUS? Because if this is any indication of the tone and tenor of his campaign, he's not going to make it to the first primary debate.
Exit thought: Noah Rothman wrote something depressing the other day:
If Jeb Bush does secure the GOP presidential nomination, the 2016 presidential race will come down to two candidates who would have both approved of the Iraq War, even though only one will be honest about that decision. Advantage Bush? I’m not so sure. To gamble that the electorate would prefer to have a truth-teller in office rather than a politician who weaves comforting fictions is a risky bet.
Yes, Jeb winning the Republican nomination despite the above would also be a huge downer. But I'm referring to that last sentence. You see, the problem with politicians who "weave comforting fictions" is that eventually, reality violently intervenes and blows those comforting fictions sky-high. And then, only then, does that same electorate demand that their leader "do something," except that "doing something" to prevent such a cataclysm is precisely what they elected their president not to do.
They - we - in other words, cannot have it both ways. Not in a twenty-first century where weapons of mass destruction have proliferated and nobody fights transparently anymore and enemies can effortlessly infiltrate our country and wipe out entire cities with the planting of a suitcase or backpack and the setting of a timer or push of a cell phone button. Nick Fury may not have seen Hydra coming, but he wasn't wrong about Project Insight, and in the real world, George W. Bush wasn't wrong about the lesson of 9/11 and the need to preempt national security threats before they become existential. His mistake was in not taking the concept far enough, and leaving the enemy regimes in Damascus and especially Tehran in place to quietly wage war against us in Iraq and undermine domestic public support for what was accomplished there and in Afghanistan. The proverbial burro that starved to death between two bails of hay.
The truth, the bottom line, is that a POTUS cannot run U.S. foreign policy in a land of soft-headed make-believe, unless his/her objective is to plunge the world into another global conflict and get countless Americans, military and civilian, massacred. And the fact that corrupt, ignorant, noodle-headed American voters twice elected not just a naif, but an active enemy of their own country who has been and is doing everything in his vast, usurped power to bring us down and ensure that our enemies take our place in the world guarantees that if another Republican ever makes it to the White House ever again, that person is going to be faced with almost certain multiple regional wars and perhaps World War IV (the Cold War was World War III) in which the "decision points" are going to make the ones that confronted Bush43 look like coin-flipping.
Give me a truth-teller any day. The time has run out for indulging in comforting fiction weaving - hell, it ran out a long time ago. And if the latter is what the aforementioned corrupt, ignorant, noodle-headed U.S. voting majority still wants, then they can elect Elizabeth Warren or back Barack Obama's coup by popular acclamation and on their own (and, regrettably, our) heads be Armageddon. The last thing Republican voters need to do is cave yet again and choose as our standardbearer a "surrender-lite" candidate, or a scrotumless squish like Jeb Bush who can't even bear up under the klieg lights of Megyn Kelly.
No comments:
Post a Comment