The photo caption reads “Please, don’t.”
On the off chance those two perfect words aren’t enough, here’s plenty more from Michael Brendan Dougherty:
By the time 2016 rolls around, it will have been eight years since the previous Bush presided over an economic disaster. The economy may have mostly recovered, but it is drastically more unequal. What is Bush’s cheerleading going to do for that? Does anyone think the GOP needs another captain of private equity to be its leader? And as loathsome and un-American as it may seem to hold someone’s family name against him, this point needs to be emphasized: the GOP and the country don’t need another Bush.
Although recent years have made me appreciate the creative realism of George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy, Jeb Bush seems to be taking after his moralizing and confrontational brother, rather than his more restrained, consensus-building father. A recent speech in Miami revealed that Bush accepts the “we’re-rubber, you’re-glue” moral calculus of the most hawkish voices. When America kills foreigners, the foreigners are to blame. But when Russia invades Ukraine, or Syria disintegrates into civil war, that’s America’s fault for not doing something. This is stupid and dangerous.
The George H. W. Bush style of domestic policy that both his sons inherited is one of giving liberal programs half the funding and authority liberals want, but dolloping on so much conservative-branded “accountability” that it can be sold to the right. Poppy pushed “standards-based reform.” W. did No Child Left Behind. And Jeb is the leading GOP advocate for what’s become of Common Core. Whatever the merits, being identified so closely with a Bill-Gates subsidized education scheme hated by both the the right wing to Louis C.K. will prove costly.
Read the whole thing.
Jeb Bush seems like a decent guy, the kind of guy you’d like as a neighbor, maybe even to head up your Boy Scout troop.
But this country ought to be done with political dynasties, especially one as tarnished as the Bushes.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member