Politix Update: Jeb Bush Pisses On A Third Rail Of American Politics

For a brief if not shining moment, it occurred to me that Jeb Bush might just be the guy to make the 2016 presidential race interesting.  I'm not saying that I'd vote for him, but I had really hoped that Hillary Clinton would not win in a walk because she was opposed by some Republican chucklehead.  Yet in the space of four days last week, Jeb not only dashed my hopes, but angered me in a way that no presidential aspirant has done in a long time.

Perhaps fittingly, what tripped up the former Florida governor was the late, unlamented war that defined his older brother's presidency and already is haunting other Republican wannabes. 

Bush, asked last week in an interview in the comfy confines of a Fox News studio of whether, knowing what he knows now, would he support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he answered that he would have.  Realizing that he had stepped in a Superfund-sized pile of excrement, he then tried to walk back his answer the following day by saying he had "interpreted the question wrong."  Then, the day after that, he said wouldn't engage in "hypotheticals."  And finally -- on the fourth day and in a moment of blinding clarity that well defined his character, or lack thereof -- he said he wasn't interested in "going back in time" because that would be "a disservice" to those who had served in the war.  

Then there is the issue of why Bush's handlers were so feckless as to have not prepped him with a snappy answer to an all but inevitable question, the very one that kept tripping up Hillary Clinton in her presidential bid.  After tying his shoelaces together and falling on his face, Bush opined that Hillary would say the same thing.  That is demonstrably false, although like most senators (but not Barack Obama) she was for the war in 2003 before she was against it, finally settling on the line during the 2008 Democratic primary that "If we knew then what we know now, I would never have voted to give this president the authority."

No, what burned the red, white and blue ass of this veteran is that Jeb Bush defaulted to cowardice.  Because, doncha know, any criticism of the troops and by extension his former commander-in-chief brother is unpatriotic -- a battle-tested, if vile, tactic from the Republican playbook to tamp down dissent when it threatens to come uncomfortably close to the truth.

If this response has the ring of familiarity, it is because President Bush, and Vice President Cheney in particular, used it early and often in calling into question anyone and everyone who opposed that fool's mission, which wasted nearly 4,500 American and perhaps 110,000 Iraqi lives, left the country in far worse shape than when the war began, further destabilized one of the world's most volatile regions and handed Iran -- and by extension Al Qaeda and an emergent ISIS -- an enormous strategic advantage.  

Republican presidential wannabe Scott Walker, while not exactly defending Bush’s serial faux pax, offered that "any president would have likely taken the same action [President] Bush did with the information he had," while wannabe Marco Rubio got all pissy when a Fox News interviewer tried to pin him down on Sunday, choosing to criticize the questions he was being asked rather than give a semblance of a straight answer about whether he now thought the war was a mistake.

Bush did say later that "mistakes were made."  An appropriate follow-up question would have been, "By whom, Mr. Bush?"

The answer is that "mistakes were made" by the very people who are the core of the younger Bush's foreign policy team.  In fact, that team is a Who's Who of the architects of the Iraq War, including Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Michael Zoellick, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss.  Oh, and Michael Chertoff.  I guess that Bill Kristol, Richard Perle and Cheney were unavailable.

It remains to be seen if Jeb Bush's moment of candor will affect his long-term chances.  It certainly won't rule out a shot at the Republican nomination and perhaps Hillary herself since getting things disastrously wrong and never owning up to them is a badge of honor in American politics these days.  But woe befall Jeb if he continues to try to be his brother's keeper in the general election, let alone reveal stuff like a remark made in an off-the-record moment at a donors' event last week that George W. Bush is one of his "principal advisers on the Middle East." 

Color me not just angry at Jeb, but disappointed in him.  Silly, silly me to have thought he was made of better stuff.

TIME TO GET REAL ABOUT THE WAR?

The stumblings of Bush, Walker and now Rubio -- with more presidential aspirants bound to trip up, as well -- would seem to be a terrific opportunity to have a long overdue public discussion about the Iraq War.  After all, over 80 percent of Americans in one recent poll now believe the war to have been wrong (although goodly number of the comparatively few diehard supporters are Republicans). 

Well, don't hold your breath.  I just don't see it happening with a news media with a collective case of Attention Deficit Disorder and an antipathy, even at this late date, to call a lie a lie.  Then there was the media's own inexcusable dereliction of duty in covering the war, notably its inability to suss out the fictions justifying the invasion while there was a real war to be fought in Afghanistan. 

PHOTOGRAPH FROM NBC NEWS