Jeb Bush in the Vortex?

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The thought of another Bush presidency sends chills down my spine and makes me think about the need to emigrate should America be insane enough to elect another Bush to the White House.  Yet despite the damage the Bush clan has inflicted on the nation, particularly in the person of Chimperator George W. Bush, some Republicans are seriously courting Jeb Bush as a 2016 presidential candidate.  It's as if these folks suffer from battered wife syndrome or some other mental affliction.  WTF is wrong with these people?   Maureen Dowd has a wonderfully snarky column in the New York Times that looks at the frightening phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

The epic sibling drama of the Republican Party is finally coming to a climax.

For many years, George and Barbara Bush assumed that their second son, Jeb, would be a winner in politics, while W., their eldest, would be a loser.

Jeb was the prince of the dynasty, destined to be king. (Poppy Bush would only call their dynasty “the d word,” wrinkling his nose in a vain attempt to seem like a Greenwich populist.)

Democrats began mocking them during their twin races as “Tweedledee and Tweedledum,” especially after W. began stealing Jeb’s best campaign lines. Yet when I covered the fraternal gubernatorial bids in the South, it was quickly apparent that W. had a crackle that Jeb did not have, not to mention a crack consultant: Karl Rove. W. was driven by a zeal to prove his parents wrong, one of the most powerful impulses on earth.

Jeb, the Good Son, seemed more phlegmatic, bogged down in wonky discourse about “visioning,” “prioritizing,” “empowering” and “sharing a good exchange of ideas.”

Jeb lost his race and W. won his, starting the reversal that would lead to W. becoming the black-sheep king, once Jeb had helped secure Florida for him. 

Now Jeb has to figure out if W. has fouled the waters forever, or if Americans, lulled by the ex-president’s winsome paintings, have grown less disgusted by his disastrous wars, misadventures in torture and economic belly flop. Jeb’s father desperately wants him to run and his mother now says it would be O.K., despite her reservations about two families trading Air Force One back and forth.

As Hillary Clinton prepares to restore her dynasty, Jeb Bush is dropping a handkerchief about restoring his.

He has campaigned for Republicans around the country and influential donors in the G.O.P. have started a draft-Jeb movement. He was the speaker at a V.I.P. dinner in Las Vegas with Sheldon Adelson. He has reached out to Southern evangelical leaders. . . . 

But is Jeb’s race over before it begins? He would be running, after all, to lead a party he seems to disdain, a party that has become so fragmented and pulled to the right that it would rather lose the election than be led by someone as moderate as Jeb Bush.

“I do think we’ve lost our way,” Jeb said in an interview on stage with a Fox News reporter, urging Republicans to move out of Crazy Town: “We need to elect candidates that have a vision that is bigger and broader, and candidates that are organized around winning the election, not making a point.”

Sounding nostalgic for a world before Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin and Ted Cruz, the 61-year-old said he would only run if he could bring a “hopeful” message and campaign “joyfully,” avoiding “the vortex of the mud fight.”

Then he stumbled into the vortex by repeating his support for Common Core education standards and by trying to inject some compassion into the immigration issue, which sends older, white Tea Partiers into frenzies of fanaticism.

Karl Rove and Bill Kristol mused that Jeb’s “Bulworth” moment, as Politico dubbed it, may show he’s been out of the mix for too long. Conservative columnist Byron York suggested that the “mud-fight-averse” Jeb “just doesn’t seem like a politician in top fighting shape.” Michelle Malkin tweeted: “He’s pro-amnesty, pro-Common Core, pro-Big Business & he wants to be president. #CancelJebBush.” Marco Rubio said he would not step aside for his mentor in a presidential race.

Jeb thinks Republicans have lost their way. He may soon learn that a lot of conservatives think they have found their way — and it’s not the joyful, loving, government-can-be-a-force-for-good way. It’s the mean, cruel, gut-the-government way.

When this crowd thinks of a Thousand Points of Light, they’re thinking of torches as they march toward the Capitol.

Frankly, the only positive Jeb has is that he's not as crazy as most of the GOP nowadays.  But not being crazy is not exactly grounds for electing someone to the White House.