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No, Jeb. Just no.

May 14, 2015 by Dave Knadler

george w. and jeb bush

Images in mirror may be closer than they appear.

Was invading Iraq a good idea? If somebody takes more than two seconds to answer with a simple uppercase “NO,” you have to wonder about their grasp of reality. You really have to wonder if that person should run for president.

But there’s Jeb Bush, parsing and equivocating and trying to make it sound like supporting one’s troubled brother matters more than correctly identifying the nation’s biggest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam.

I don’t get this. Jeb Bush seemed to be the only GOP presidential candidate who had not arrived by clown car, the only one even remotely electable, and yet he refuses to acknowledge the obvious: We screwed up big time. (Well, not “we,” per se, but it does involve a W.) It’s a mistake that keeps on corroding the country in myriad ways.

I don’t know; maybe it just hasn’t hurt the Bush family personally.

Jeb says the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. Maybe so, if some Jeffersonian figure had risen in Saddam’s place. Instead we’ve got ISIS, the murderous loons who make Saddam look like Mahatma Gandhi. We’ve got many thousands maimed and dead, many billions wasted, and the Middle East is arguably a much worse shithole than when we started.

We don’t set the bar very high for presidential candidates in 2015: just show up in a suit and refrain from major felonies. But people who drone on about the future should display a passing familiarity with the past.

More along these lines:

  • newt gingrich drill now adWhy didn’t anybody think of this before?
  • Where credit is dueWhere credit is due
  • Can we leave Hitler out of this?
  • john edwards indictmentsGuy walks into a bar …
  • My evening with the ex-president

Filed Under: politics

About Dave Knadler

Obscure writer. Lazy photographer. Bashful guitarist. Perhaps too fond of wine. Tireless nemesis of New York Times crosswords.

Comments

  1. Michael Stockhill says

    May 17, 2015 at 4:48 pm

    This is right up there with Judith Miller and James O’Keefe having their conversation on journalistic ethics. What a fun week.

  2. John H. says

    May 18, 2015 at 2:01 pm

    Loyalty is *the* right-wing virtue, far more important than anything else. So ol’ Jeb is in a bind. To win, he would have to say something like, “Last time I agreed with my brother was when I was rigging the vote-counting for him in 1999.” But if he does that, he sounds disloyal, and the faithful will judge him harshly.

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