The End of the Bush Dynasty?

I never have been a fan of Jeb Bush - or any of the Bush clan for that matter, especially the cretinous George W. Bush who brought so much otherwise avoidable misfortune on the nation. After his drubbing in South Carolina, it seems that even whacked out members of the GOP base were unwilling to give the Bush dynasty another chance to harm the country.  Too many of those of an older age remember the contrast between the Clinton White House years and the last Bush's misrule and national disaster.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at how Jeb went down the drain while Hillary Clinton has managed to stay relevant.  Here are highlights:

The Clinton political dynasty is still alive. The Bush dynasty has been routed. Their contrasting fates, to this point at least, tell us much about our two parties, the nature of this year’s presidential election, and the dueling legacies themselves.

The Republican and Democratic contests are very different, beginning with the fact that Hillary Clinton did not have to deal with Donald Trump, who targeted Jeb Bush with a viciousness rarely seen in contemporary politics. For months, the self-contained former Florida governor responded ineffectually to an opponent who flouted all the norms. This only made it easier for Trump to mock him as “low energy” and “weak.”

Bush was also entitled to a certain bitterness as he watched Marco Rubio, his ambitious and impatient protege, seize his natural base in the party: voters who loathe both Trump and Ted Cruz. Rubio’s definition of loyalty did not include yielding to his one-time mentor. . . .  his efforts came too late, and were, in any event, out of tune with so many in a party eager to respond to angry and exclusionary rhetoric.

Clinton now faces only one opponent, and Bernie Sanders, especially in contrast to the often thuggish behavior of Republican candidates toward each other, has been positively courtly. Building a durable progressive wing of the Democratic Party clearly matters more to him than scoring points off Clinton.

In a party whose election victories are increasingly dependent on heavy turnout among younger voters (when they don’t show up, the Democrats lose, as they did in 2010 and 2014), Sanders has overwhelmed Clinton among those under 45. He did it again in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday.

Endurance under trial is a defining characteristic of a Clinton brand that also has the benefit of being less established than the Bush trademark. The Clintons have been in the public consciousness since 1992. Bushes have been in presidential politics since 1980 and on the national stage since 1952, when Prescott Bush, Jeb’s grandfather, entered the U.S. Senate. If the Clintons aren’t exactly Facebook, neither are they General Motors or Studebaker. 

And while frustration on the Democratic left with Bill Clinton’s pro-business policies has fed support for Sanders, the antipathy to both Bush presidencies on the Republican right runs far deeper.  . . . . Moreover, even some of Bush’s natural allies among Republican professionals worried that public memories of the peaceful and prosperous Bill Clinton years were much fonder than those of a George W. Bush presidency characterized by an unpopular war and a financial meltdown.  

Jeb can console himself that his son George P. Bush , a Texas politician, is already in the family business, and that being scorned by fellow Republicans is part of the family’s tradition.

Trump Wins South Carolina - Bush Suspends Campaign

The frightening Trump juggernaut continues as the loud mouthed, fascist rallies the poorly educated and racially bigoted and wins the South Carolina primary today.  Placing 4th place, Jeb Bush suspends his campaign which has been largely on life support since his drubbing in Iowa.  I suspect that open panic has overtaken the GOP establishment as this further proof that the Frankenstein monster that it happily created over the last two decades is now proving to be uncontrollable.  Worse yet for some in the donor class is the realization that $100 million+ was flushed down the toilet in their backing backing Jebbie.  The only possible consolation is that Marcobot has apparently beat out the very scary Ted Cruz to take second place.  Whether Marcobot, an empty suit by some estimations can stop Trump of course is yet to be seen.  The New York Times looks at the upside down world in the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Donald J. Trump won a clear victory in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, cementing his position as the Republican presidential front-runner as he enters a tougher test in a series of potentially decisive March contests.

Mr. Trump ran ahead of Senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Marco Rubio of Florida, who were locked in a battle for second place. Both have struggled to become the principal alternative to Mr. Trump, a larger-than-life candidate from outside the political system whose nomination would upend the Republican Party.

Mr. Trump has benefited so far from a fractious group of candidates running against him. But the results in South Carolina may narrow that field to a small and tenacious handful, possibly opening the way for a concerted challenge to Mr. Trump next month in delegate-rich states like Texas, Virginia and Florida.

Yet by capturing the first Southern primary immediately after winning New Hampshire in a landslide, Mr. Trump made clear that he would not be easy to stop. Using blunt and at times incendiary language, he found strong support from Republicans without a college degree, who are angriest about the federal government and who favor a hard line on illegal immigration, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls.

Jeb Bush brought his older brother, his mother, Barbara, and other relatives to South Carolina to campaign for him. But primary voters here indicated that whatever affection they had for the Bush family was largely nostalgic. They thoroughly rejected Jeb Bush’s candidacy.

Gov. John Kasich of Ohio also finished well behind the top three candidates, but was already seeking to make a case for continuing his candidacy by leaving South Carolina and campaigning Saturday in Vermont and Massachusetts, which hold primaries on Super Tuesday, March 1, along with 11 other states and American Samoa. (South Carolina’s Democratic primary will be held on Feb. 27.)

Seven of the March 1 states are either in the South or border that conservative-leaning region, making the next 10 days pivotal for Mr. Cruz, who has staked his candidacy on being able to consolidate party hard-liners. . . . Such voters, however, appear divided. Mr. Trump, who has never held elected office and rails against political leaders, led the polls in South Carolina for months, typically by double-digit margins. 

On the eve of the primary, Mr. Trump reiterated his support for using torture against suspected terrorists and, musing about how to stop Islamic radicals, repeated approvingly an account of how the early 20th-century Army general John J. Pershing, before executing Muslim prisoners in the Philippines, “took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood.” (The story has circulated for years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but is apparently apocryphal.)

More remarkable given where the race took place was Mr. Trump’s repeated mocking of George W. Bush’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks. And his claim in a debate last weekend that the Bush administration had deliberately lied to start a war in Iraq drew sharp rebukes from national Republican leaders, including former Vice President Dick Cheney.

National party leaders in Washington have looked to the vote in South Carolina as a chance for one of Mr. Trump’s mainstream competitors to consolidate support, and perhaps to emerge as a consensus alternative to him.  Mr. Rubio, whose earlier efforts to rally the party behind him disintegrated after a catastrophic debate performance and a weak finish in New Hampshire, may be best positioned to become that candidate, gaining in the late polls here and brandishing Gov. Nikki R. Haley’s endorsement as an important trophy.

Trump Slams George W. Bush's Lies and Fool's Errands

As noted, the husband and I were out with friends last evening so we missed the Republican presidential candidate "debate."  Perhaps the most delicious moment in the free for all was when Donald Trump accurately assailed George W. Bush for not preventing 9-11, lying the nation into the Iraq War disaster, and not following through to eliminate Osama Bin Laden.  It truly must have been a spectacle.  A piece in Politico looks at the train wreck which must have left Democrats grinning.  Here are highlights:

It was weird that an angry Code Pink-style protester interrupted last night’s Republican presidential debate with a barrage of familiar Democratic talking points about George W. Bush—that he lied the country into a disastrous war in Iraq, failed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and even whiffed on an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden. It was especially weird that the protestor was one Donald J. Trump, who happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Trump didn’t just call the Iraq war a mistake. He called it “a big fat mistake.” And he didn't call it an inadvertent mistake because of faulty intelligence. “They lied!” he thundered. “They said there were weapons of mass destruction … and they knew there were none.” Trump even groused that the war cost $5 trillion that could have helped rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure, a common Democratic attack line that sounded like a canine talking point at a feline convention, especially in military-heavy South Carolina.

Trump’s extended Bush-lied-people-died diatribe, featuring repeated scoffing at Republican Bush-kept-us-safe dogma, was the most surreal stretch of a debate that generally could have been scripted by Salvador Dali.

Trump boasted about his opposition to the Iraq war early in the debate, claiming that he warned at the time that it would destabilize the Middle East—a claim for which there is no evidence—but his real blast into the past began, as his blasts so often do, as a non-sequitur attack on Jeb Bush, who had just made some points about Russia. “Jeb is so wrong,” Trump scoffed. “If you listen to him, that’s why we’ve been in the Middle East for 15 years, and we haven’t won anything.”

[M]oderator John Dickerson asked Trump about an old quote where he had suggested that President Bush should have been impeached over Iraq, which gave Trump another excuse to carpet-bomb the Bush family.

“Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right?” he said. “It took Jeb Bush, if you remember when he announced for president, it took him five days—it was a mistake, it wasn’t a mistake, it took him five days before his people told him what to say, and he ultimately said it was a mistake. … Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty.”

When Dickerson asked Trump again whether the president should have been impeached, Jeb tried to interrupt—“I think it’s my turn, isn’t it?”—but Trump steamrolled ahead. “You call it whatever they want,” he said. “They lied.”

Trump barreled back into the fray: “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign, remember that,” he said. “That’s not keeping us safe.” That sounded more like a canine talking point at a fire hydrant convention, pure heresy in a Republican context.

When Trump went back on the warpath, again noting that the 9/11 attacks happened on Bush’s watch—“That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe.”—Rubio went back to the Republican playbook, blaming Bush’s predecessor for the attacks.

 

“The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance,” Rubio said. 

Trump didn’t let that pass, either, raising bin Laden’s escape at Tora Bora during the Bush administration. “By the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn’t listen to the advice of his CIA,” Trump said to a chorus of boos. At this point in the metaphor, the canine was basically biting the audience of whatever convention he was addressing, and probably chewing on the furniture, too.

[O]verall, the night was a Democratic dream, with the Republicans not only pushing each other to the right on issues like abortion, gay rights, immigration and foreign affairs, but ripping each other to shreds. While Jeb and the audience focused their ire on Trump, Rubio and Trump both called Ted Cruz a liar. “This guy will say anything,” Trump said.

“We’re fixing to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this,” Kasich said last night. So far, nobody has figured out how to stop the guy who will say anything.

Winners and Losers from the 8th Republican "Debate"

I will admit that I did not watch the latest GOP circus last night dubiously called a debate - we had dinner out with friends at Le Yaca in Williamsburg.   Hence, I defer to Chris Cillizza's analysis of the apparent ugliness in the Washington Post.  Here are excerpts:

In the wake of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the six remaining Republican presidential candidates gathered in South Carolina for the 8th GOP debate. I watched — and picked some of the best. Also, some of the worst.

Winners:

* Marco Rubio: After a disastrous debate a week ago, the Florida senator proved that his robotic repetition issue was an exception not the rule. His answers on potentially problematic questions about the child tax credit and poverty were thoughtful, nuanced and convincing. He managed to emerge as the best defender of George W. Bush's national security record in a fight against Donald Trump despite the fact that Jeb Bush was also on the stage. Rubio also effectively faced down Ted Cruz on immigration, painting Cruz as a flip-flopper and someone willing to say anything to get elected. Does Rubio still talk a little too fast and sound a little too rehearsed? Yes. But, he clearly helped himself in advance of next Saturday's South Carolina Republican primary.

* Jeb Bush: Bush, to his credit, has gotten significantly better as a debater over the course of this race. He was the best I have seen him Saturday night — facing down Trump time and time again and, largely, winning those exchanges. What's fascinating is that, at least Saturday night, Bush seemed able to get under Trump's skin; there were several exchanges, particularly over his brother's time in office, where Trump seemed to lose his cool while Bush kept calm and carried on. His regular references to his mom seemed a bit over the top to me but I get that Barbara Bush — and the whole Bush clan — is quite popular in the Palmetto State. One problem for Bush: If he needs to beat Rubio to keep going in this race, I am not sure Saturday night will help that cause.

Losers:

* Donald Trump: On the bright side, the entire debate revolved around Trump in a way that past debates have not. (Trump often disappeared into the background as past debates wore on.) On the much less bright side, Trump seemed somewhat out of control and angry for much of the debate.  He made his point about the legacy of George W. Bush but the repeated emphasis on how the former president let the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 happen on his watch felt way overdone. Trump, who often comes across as tough yet good-natured, came across on Saturday night as downright mean in several exchanges with Bush and Cruz. (And, as any politician will tell you, it's tough to make Cruz into an empathetic figure.) Trump's hard-core supporters will never leave him — no matter how well or badly he does in a debate. And, his hard-core supporters may well be enough to carry him to victory in a week's time in South Carolina. But, that doesn't mean Trump was good Saturday night. He wasn't.

* Ben Carson: I feel almost bad saying this but Carson shows with every passing debate just how far out of his depth he really is. Carson looks lost when he gets time to speak, and his answers very rarely add up to, well, anything.

* The Republican Party: This debate was downright nasty. Tons of name-calling. Lots of quotes that can be harvested by Democrats to be used against whoever emerges from the current bloodbath to be the Republican nominee. Just a bad face to put forward to the public.

Has Trump the Bully Hit a Wall?

I view both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz with revulsion.  Both would be an unmitigated disaster for America in the White House.  Trump is in many ways little more than a loud mouthed bully who excels at insults and nasty sound bites, but to date has offered zero in terms of any real substantive policies.  And when it comes to attacking his GOP rivals, he tends to prefer personal insults rather than debate and differences over policies and proposed initiatives.  Like a classic school yard bully, Trump has attracted those who like seeming confidence, especially when pandering to existing prejudices in his audience.  Ted Cruz, to my view, is equally despicable, but as a piece in Politico, Cruz just may be the one who can damage the Trump juggernaut.  Personally, I'd like to see both self-destruct.  Here are article excerpts:

Like all accomplished bullies, Trump understands that the real target is his opponent’s honor. Obeying the maxim that you haven’t gone far enough until you’ve gone too far, Trump slagged Bush’s wife last July, using Twitter to post a quotation from a tweet that said Bush “has to like Mexican Illegals because of his wife.” Trump deleted the tweet, which implied that Columba Bush was not in the country legally. Bush took personal umbrage over the tweet, which was deleted 24 hours after it was posted. “He’s doing this to inflame and incite and to draw attention,” Bush sputtered in the manner of someone whose honor has been wounded. The point of Trump's tweet was to lure Bush into defending Columba, his Spanish-speaking wife and the mother of his three children, thereby boxing him in as conflicted over immigration. It was a brilliant bully move.

When discussing the art of the verbal bully, you really can’t spend too much time on honor. The bully undermines his foes by stripping them of whatever esteem, standing and face they may have acquired. When a man’s mother, wife or daughter is disparaged in most cultures, he must defend her honor or risk losing his manliness. This prompted only more Bush sputtering that Trump must apologize to Columba; Trump’s resopnse (“I won’t apologize, I didn’t do anything wrong”) sliced Bush’s cojones right out of his trousers. 

So how do you beat a verbal bully? We’re actually starting to see it happen. Stanley Elkin sketched a strategy in his 1964 short story, “A Poetics for Bullies.” In it, a young bully named Push torments and leads all the kids in the neighborhood until he is undone by a princely newcomer John Williams, whose accent can’t be mocked, whose skin has no blemish, whose intelligence is impervious to insult. 

Nobody would ever mistake Ted Cruz for John Williams. No Adonis, he looks like a broken-nosed character actor in a film noir. He even whines when he talks. But inside his own head, Cruz is John Williams. He has been polishing the Cruz act for his entire life, making himself a perfectly smooth, unchanging object upon which no New York bully can get a grip. Although Trump may have bested Cruz on several topics in last night’s presidential debate as they fought toe-to-toe for the first time, the mogul seems unable to get under Cruz’s skin the way he has with Bush, Carson, Rand Paul (ridiculing him for being short, just 5’8”!), and the other candidates.

Like Trump, Cruz commands an alpha male’s ego. When towel-snapped, he does not shriek. When denigrated or teased, he does not frown or wince. He does not have to be perfect because he already thinks he’s perfect, which is just one of the reasons why the rest of Congress despises him.

The best way to beat a trash-talking bully is to convincingly pretend you cannot hear him. Donald Trump, you have met your John Williams.

   

GOP Establishment Pressures Bush to "Not Elect Donald Trump"

Remember when the so-called GOP establishment viewed Jeb Bush as the party savior who would sweep in and save the GOP by securing the presidential nomination?  Perhaps it was always a delusional fantasy, but now, as Politico reports, some on the GOP establishment are calling on Jeb Bush to refrain from attacking Marco Rubio and thereby handing the GOP nomination to demagogue extraordinaire, Donald Trump.  Personally, I could never see Jebbie as an attractive candidate, especially given the reality that many of the nation's current problems stem back to the rule of his brother, the Chimperator.  Here are excerpts from Politico on the new infighting: 

[I]ncreasingly, establishment Republicans worry that Bush’s campaign is little more than an ego trip. With the former Florida governor now sitting stagnant in the middle of the pack and his super PAC ratcheting up its attacks on Marco Rubio, a growing number of Republican centrists are coming to view Bush’s campaign as a distraction — one that could hurt their ability to keep the nomination away from Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.

On Monday, the Right to Rise PAC hit the early state airwaves with an ad skewering Bush’s former protégé for flipping on immigration—an issue on which he and Bush actually agree. And on Tuesday, the group unleashed a second ad that portrayed Rubio as a flip-flopper and mocked his heeled boots.

[T]o those who no longer believe Bush can win the Republican nomination, his [Bush's] super PAC, with tens of millions of dollars left to spend, looks more like a wrecking ball meant to lay waste to the one contender many Bush donors see as the last remaining mainstream alternative to Trump or Cruz.

“This is something Jeb Bush has to decide. Does he want his legacy to be that he elected Donald Trump or Ted Cruz?” said Stuart Stevens, the GOP strategist who ran Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “He can’t control that super PAC but he ought to call on the super PAC to stop and stop attacking people with whom he mostly agrees.”

“This thing has been mismanaged and screwed up since the beginning,” said a Jeb Bush backer in the Washington area who worked in both previous Bush administrations. “It’s gotten to the point where the old-timers are saying ‘it’s really sad.’ How as presumptive leader with $100 million in the bank did you get yourself in a box where you have to attack Rubio and Christie to win your lane?”

“The chances of those ads hurting Rubio are a lot stronger than the odds of them helping Jeb,” said Curt Anderson, a Republican strategist who ran Bobby Jindal’s campaign last year. “The Right to Rise folks don’t want to end the campaign with $30 million in the bank and they probably realize the positive spots haven’t helped Jeb at all.

“To stay in a race and spend millions and millions of dollars attacking other candidates you basically agree with, that starts to look like spite,” said Stevens. “It’s one thing to lose a race and have run a good race. It’s another thing to lose and have as your legacy that you attempted to destroy everybody else who was most like you. That’s a very negative legacy and it’s a long lasting one, and that’s the question that should be paramount in the Bush organization.”

“People around him have just reached a point of pure anger,” said one Florida politico who is supporting Rubio. “This is purely just hatred amongst his staff to go after Marco out of jealousy, spite, you name it—because everyone knows the one person who can win is Marco and yet they’re doing everything they can to hurt him. They still can’t get over him having the audacity to run.”

[S]ome are coming to the conclusion that Jeb can’t win and they’re worried his super PAC is going to ensure that no other establishment candidate does either. Everyone is looking at [Right to Rise director Mike] Murphy and saying, what are you going to do with our money? Something useful that helps the party or are you going to blow it all up?”

Meanwhile, of course, the establishment members continue to concede that they are the ones who empowered the lunatics of the GOP by shortsightedly  embracing Christofascists, white supremacists, and other ugly elements that morphed into the so-called Tea Party.

Jeb Bush: Only Christians Should be Allowed Refugee Status

Seeking to quickly pander to the Christofascists that largely control the Republican Party base, an increasingly desperate Jeb Bush stated that the USA must only allow Syrian Christians be allowed refugee status.  Bush, of course, is not the only GOP presidential contestants seeking to shamelessly prostitute himself to the portion of the party base who want to establish nothing less than a Christian theocracy in America or, if that goal fails, then establish special rights and privileges for hate and fear motivated evangelical Christians under the guise of "religious freedom" laws.  Jeb Bush not surprisingly totally ignores the role of his cretin brother in creating the instability in the Middle East that has allowed ISIS to come into being and expand.  The Raw Story looks at Jeb's desperate effort to pander to bigots:

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said over the weekend that the U.S. should respond to the terrorist attacks in Paris by carefully screening out Syrian refugees who are not Christians. 

“As it relates to the refugees, I think we need to do thorough screen,” Bush told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday. “And take a limited number. But ultimately, the best way to deal with the refugee crisis is to create safe zones inside of Syria so that people don’t risk their lives, and you don’t have what will be a national security challenge for both our country and for Europe of screening.”

But there was one group which should be allowed to take refuge in the U.S., the former Florida governor argued. 

“There are a lot of Christians in Syria that have no place now,” he explained. “They’ll be either executed or imprisoned, either by Assad or by ISIS. And I think we should have — we should focus our efforts as it relates to the Christians that are being slaughtered.”

Tapper wondered how screeners would know which refugees were Christians.  “We do that all the time,” Bush insisted. “I think we need to be — obviously — very, very cautious. This also calls to mind the need to protect our borders, our southern border particularly.”

“This is a threat against Western civilization, and we need to lead. The United States has pulled back and when we pull back, voids are filled. And they’re filled now by Islamic terrorism that threatens our country.”

According to Bush, apparently only Christians merit humanitarian efforts.  The man is not only disgusting, but seems to be even dumber than his idiot brother.