Thinking About Jeb, GOP? Please Think Again

The thing about Jeb Bush is, the more you see and hear of him, the worse he gets:

During a “Family Reunion” conference hosted by the Hispanic Leadership Network in April 2013, Jeb Bush spoke freely on the promise immigrants hold for America and his views on reform. He said, during a discussion with Univision, that it was “ridiculous” to think that DREAMers, children brought to the U.S. by their parents illegally, shouldn’t have an “accelerated path” to citizenship.

Then, the former Florida governor was speaking to a friendly audience of establishment Republicans, after re-inserting himself in the immigration reform with the release of a controversial book on the issue a month prior. But as he moves towards a probable presidential run, and the far less friendly terrain of the GOP primary fight, the comments, which were shared with CNN by Democratic tracking firm American Bridge, are certain to deepen already developing headaches for him — on both the left and especially the right, as conservatives react in a mixture of bewilderment and eye-rolling when confronted with some of Bush’s resurfaced lines on immigration.

Jeb also has some advice for Detroit — repopulate the city with “immigrants.” For sheer mealy-mouthed politically correct cluelessness, it’s tough to beat the stupid in this statement (emphasis mine):

“It just seems to me that maybe if you open up our doors in a fair way and unleashed the spirit of peoples’ hard work, Detroit could become in really short order, one of the great American cities again,” Bush said then. “Now it would look different, it wouldn’t be Polish…But it would be just as powerful, just as exciting, just as dynamic. And that’s what immigration does and to be fearful of this, it just seems bizarre to me.”

The comments Bush made several years ago weren’t dealbreakers for him in a primary, multiple conservative operatives and lawmakers said. And they didn’t reveal beliefs or positions on immigration that he hasn’t already openly held.

But they were so atypical for a Republican candidate gearing up for a presidential run that the universal reaction from conservative operatives was “Wow.”

Wow is right. Anybody who thinks Detroit (or even Hamtramck) is “Polish” is simply delusional. But the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party is bound and determined to continue the heroic work of the first Arab-American president, Barack Hussein Obama, and doesn’t much care which wing of the PBFP the next leader comes from. But, given the history of the patrician Bush family, why should anybody be surprised?