Jeb Bush’s Brainless Trust

Posts on this blog have not been kind to Jeb Bush - I'm trying to thank of a good nickname for him, any suggestions? - and with good reason.  From his disgusting role in the Terri Schiavo circus to his refusal to accept any responsibility on his family's part for the disasters in the Middle East and the great recession, one cannot feel even a shred of confidence that Jeb has learned anything over the last 15 years or more.  I'm sorry, but tapping an openly gay communications director and claiming that you are your own man just aren't enough to convince me that Jeb would not bring us a third term of Bush/Cheney regime - something that is terrifying to contemplate.  Maureen Dowd has a column in the New York Times that underscores Jeb Bush's obnoxious and frightening refusal to say what he would do to atone for the sins of his brother and truly move Americans other than the 1% towards a better future.  Here are column highlights:

I had been keeping an open mind on Jeb Bush.  I mean, sure, as Florida governor, he helped his brother snatch the 2000 election. And that led to two decade-long botched wars that cost tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. The nation will be dealing for a long time with struggling veterans and the loss of American prestige. Not to mention that W. let Wall Street gamble away the economy, which is only now finally creeping back.

In his foreign policy speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Jeb was dismissive toward those who want to know where he stands in relation to his father and brother. “In fact,” he said, mockingly, “this is a great, fascinating thing in the political world for some reason.”

For some reason? Like the Clintons, the Bushes drag the country through national traumas that spring from their convoluted family dynamic and then disingenuously wonder why we concern ourselves with their family dynamic. Without their last names, Hillary and Jeb would not be front-runners,. . . 

The last two presidents in his party were his father and brother, and his brother crashed the family station wagon into the globe, and Jeb is going to have to address that more thoroughly than saying “there were mistakes made in Iraq for sure.”

He says he doesn’t want to focus on “the past,” and who can blame him? But how can he talk about leading America into the future if he can’t honestly assess the past, or his family’s controversial imprint?

In his speech, he blamed President Obama for the void that hatched ISIS, which he also noted didn’t exist in 2003 at the dawn of “the liberation of Iraq.” Actually, his brother’s invasion of Iraq is what spawned Al Qaeda in Iraq, which drew from an insurgency of Sunni soldiers angry about being thrown out of work by the amateurish and vainglorious viceroy, Paul Bremer.

[F]or Bushworld, Jeb is the redeemer, the one who listens and talks in full sentences that make sense, the one who will restore the luster of the Bush name. But if you want to be your own person, you have to come up with your own people.

W. was a boy king, propped up by regents supplied by his father. . . . Jeb, too, wanted to bolster his negligible foreign policy cred, so the day of his speech, his aide released a list of 21 advisers, 19 of whom had worked in the administrations of his father and his brother. The list starts with the estimable James Baker. But then it shockingly veers into warmongers.

It’s mind-boggling, but there’s Paul Wolfowitz, the unapologetic designer of the doctrine of unilateralism and pre-emption, the naïve cheerleader for the Iraq invasion and the man who assured Congress that Iraqi oil would pay for the country’s reconstruction and that it was ridiculous to think we would need as many troops to control the country as Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army chief of staff, suggested.

If he wants to reclaim the Bush honor, Jeb should be holding accountable those who inflicted deep scars on America, not holding court with them.  Where’s the shame?  For some reason, Jeb doesn’t see it.

Jeb's brother nearly destroyed America.  Do we want another Bush presidency when Jeb refuses to even recognize the mistakes of the past and, worse yet, is surrounding himself with those who help bring about the disasters?