On the heels of The New York Times front-pager that, up until only a few years ago, would have been considered an illegal sex act in several states, we find ourselves confronted with the possibility that Jeb Bush may well take out for a spin a family name that ought to be considered an obscenity in any respectable dictionary of American democracy.
Just six years ago, at the end of the last tumultuous Bush presidency, this would have been all but unthinkable. But President Obama's troubles, the internal divisions of the Republican Party, a newfound nostalgia for the first Bush presidency and a modest softening of views about the second have changed the dynamics enough to make plausible another Bush candidacy. And while Jeb Bush wants to run as his own man, invariably this is a family with something to prove.
Please to be giving me a fking break. If they want to redeem themselves for the catastrophes that C-Plus Augustus wrought upon the country, and for Poppy's inexcusable skating away from Iran-Contra, let the whole lot of them go clean bedpans at Walter Reed. The idea that we would let any member of the Bush family -- to say nothing of the family's "vast constellation of friends, advisers, strategists, pollsters, fund-raisers, donors and supporters assembled over several generations in public life" -- anywhere near our policies in the Middle East again is rather like hiring the late Jeffrey Dahmer as the White House chef.
And, right on cue, as she invariably is when bad ideas are at play, Ruth Marcus, Washington Post columnist and scourge of teenage potty-mouths everywhere, chimes in as well with her unique blend of intellectual incoherence and abiding faith in the restorative properties of pixie dust. First, Ruth tells us that she quite logically dreads what may happen if we elect the next president out of the current Republican party, which is losing the battle against the prion disease that infected the party's brain in the 1980's. She also has her doubts about the dynastic character of re-electing another one of the Kennebunkport Plantagenets. But then...
My argument for a Jeb Bush candidacy is also twofold: It would be good for Bush's party and good for the country. Good for Republicans not just because it would give them a better shot at the White House but because the GOP has veered off the ideological rails.
And we all fall out of the back of the truck as it takes the corner on two wheels.
You know what's coming, right?
Make no mistake: Bush is a conservative. But he is a conservative who believes in the role and capacity of government and in the imperative of bipartisan cooperation. "Back to my dad's time and Ronald Reagan's time - they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support," Bush told Bloomberg View in 2012. Contrast that with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz: "I don't think what Washington needs is more compromise." And this is why a Bush candidacy would be good for the country as well. A saner Republican Party would produce saner, more productive politics. A more extreme nominee might be easier for Democrats to beat. But what if they don't? I'd rather see the more reasonable Republican candidate, because I'd rather see the more reasonable Republican president.
First of all, Jeb Bush should run so that the Republican party will be less insane? How about the party deciding on its own not to be insane? How about the party deciding that Jesus shouldn't teach biology, and that supply-side economics is a fairy tale, and that shoeless bugfk preachers should not have their phone calls returned for a few decades? How about it agrees that climate change is an actual crisis, and not an employment agency for money-grubbing scientists? Pro tip, Ruth: the party can't do that because the party doesn't have anything left but that element, plus some angry white men with guns. These are the people to whom Jeb Bush will have to cater in order to be nominated, and the people he will owe once he's elected. This is the same rap we heard about his dim older brother back in 1999. We got an incredible period of criminal negligence in the summer of 2001, two bogus wars, an American city lost to the waves, a financial meltdown, and Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito. How'd the last Bush work out for bipartisan productive politics? Can you seriously make a case that Jeb would be any better? Are you really buying what he's selling, just today, about the president and the response to Ebola?
Bush said the president was not "clear and concise" about his plans to combat Ebola, and described an incident in which anthrax was mailed in 2001 to a Florida-based tabloid, The National Enquirer, during his time in office as an example of a better approach to addressing public fears. "We gave people a sense of calm, what the plan was," Bush said. "We talked in plainspoken English. We were totally engaged."
Jeb Bush as a public health expert? I have a two-word rebuttal.
Terri Schiavo.
When that inhumane circus went up around her prolonged death, Jeb was governor of Florida, and he demonstrated all the essential backbone of a bivalve. While America's conservative intelligentsia raised up an army of riotous know-nothings to torment the good people working in a hospice, the American conservative political elite saw in this ginned-up ignorance a political opportunity. Jeb saw it, too, and he dove for it. He ordered doctors at the hospice to replace the dying woman's feeding tube. When then courts ruled against him, he appealed. At one point, he even threatened to have the state take custody of her.
Speaking from Tallahassee before the hearing, Governor Bush indicated the state might indeed try to take custody of Ms. Schiavo, which the law would allow it to do under certain circumstances. He said a new review by Dr. William P. Cheshire, a neurologist in Jacksonville, suggested that Ms. Schiavo had been misdiagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state," meaning she cannot think, emote or remember. Dr. Cheshire, who visited Ms. Schiavo in her hospice room March 1 for an hour and reviewed videotapes of her made by her parents, said that she appeared to be minimally conscious. "This new information raises serious concerns and warrants immediate action," Governor Bush said. "If there's any uncertainty, we should err on the side of protecting her."
This was bullshit political grandstanding, a sop thrown to the Jeebus hysterics waving the spoons out in the street, and everybody in Florida knew it. At the urging of the likes of Tom DeLay, the Congress passed a law mandating that Schiavo be kept alive, and Jeb's idiot brother even came back from vacation to sign it. On the state level, Jeb was just as much of an opportunistic vampire. As someone wrote in a book a few years back:
On October 21, 2003, at the encouragement if Governor Jeb Bush, the Florida legislature passed "Terri's Law," a measure specifically giving Bush the unilateral power to replace Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, which had been removed, for the second time during the endless litigation, six days earlier The law was nakedly, almost hilariously, unconstitutional, in part because it directly contradicted a law the legislature had passed during a less frenzied time several years earlier. It seemed to Annie Santa Maria that she had become hostage to a situation detached from any familiar reality..."I was watching this," Annie Laughs, "and I'm thinking, 'Surely, they're not going to pass this. They're going to overturn the self-determination act they passed years ago...Annie turned down police protection, although she'd gotten death threats. "They offered me police, but I didn't need it," she says. "There were so many other people they wanted to kill."
This was the audience Jeb Bush played to because he saw that there might be a political advantage gained by doing so. This is why Poppy signed onto whatever ratfking Lee Atwater told him was necessary, and why C-Plus Augustus employed Karl Rove. This is a family that believes itself entitled to power, whatever The New York Times thinks, and it will do anything it thinks is necessary to gain that power. They are the American Borgias, and we may never be rid of them.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
