Jebbies little secret
by digby
I wrote a piece for Salon about Jeb Bush’s foreign policy. I recount the history of Poppy and Junior and their relationship to the “realists” vs the “neocons.” I recapped some of the familiar stuff about the Project for a New American Century and then this:
And what does all this have to do with Jeb? Well, he happens to be the only Bush who was a card-carrying member of the PNAC. He was a neocon long before neocons were cool. In fact, one must suspect that his early defiance of his father and brother in this regard signals the act of a True Believer. He didn’t need to do it. He was Governor of Florida, not head of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He must have really thought the cause was righteous.
Now he’s in the terrible position of having to distance himself from the reckless foreign policy mistakes of his brother — mistakes that were initiated by the neoconservative claque of which he is a charter member. He’s forced to pretend that he’s actually an adherent of his father’s foreign policy school when in fact he was among those who rejected it with disdain back in the 1990s, an act which led to his brother’s fateful decision to invade Iraq without good cause.
Trying to manage these various pulls of family loyalty and defiance with all these warring ideological constituencies would be a challenge to the most skilled politician who has been sharpening his game for years in anticipation of a presidential run. That politician is not Jeb Bush. Right now he’s being given a smooth ride because the press and the political establishment is afraid that the lunatic fringe might get a crack at the white house and they see Jeb as the only sane alternative. The problem is that Jeb’s one of the crazies too, always has been.
The bottom line is this: if you liked Dick Cheney, you’re going to love President Jeb Bush. It turns out that Jeb’s the guy W was pretending to be.
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