The juggernaut and the libertarian struggle to escape their ties
by digby
I wrote about Jeb and Rand Paul this morning at Salon. It appears that the political press has finally caught on to the fact that this alleged juggernaut and obvious choice for the presidency has a “W” problem:
Some of us have been pointing out the great big, obvious problem with Jeb Bush’s candidacy for a while now, but it took his fumbling and mumbling these past couple of days to wake the political press to to the fact that being George W. Bush’s brother was going to cause him some very difficult moments on the campaign trail. After all, his name is Bush, the name most closely associated with America’s bedeviled relationship with Iraq for the past 25 years.
So yes, it was inevitable that Jeb would be between Iraq and a hard place in this election, and that he would not have an easy time trying to squeeze out of it. After all, no matter what people may have thought going into the war, there is a strong consensus that it failed:
A September 2014 AP-GfK poll found that 71 percent of Americans said they think history will judge the war as a failure. Among Republicans, that assessment was even more prevalent, with 76 percent saying the war would be seen a failure.
With a result like that, dancing around saying the intelligence was faulty but everyone believed it so and while you wouldn’t do it now you would have done it then isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Here’s one shocked political observer saying what he thinks needs to be said:
“[Joe] Scarborough was in disbelief over Bush’s repeated blunders this week in trying to answer whether he would have invaded Iraq like his brother George W. Bush, knowing what he knows now about the results of the war.
The MSNBC host, who supported the war in 2003, asked contributor and Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin to pose the Iraq question to him.
“No, it was a horrible idea, as bad an idea as sticking your face in a blender, what’s your next question?” Scarborough said, to laughter from the panel.
(Hillary Clinton was a bit less colorful with her mea culpa, but it amounts to the same thing: “I wasn’t alone in getting it wrong. But I still got it wrong. Plain and simple.”)
Scarborough’s not the only one taking shots. Bush’s rivals have all opportunistically stepped up to condemn him for his Iraq comments. Marco Rubio – a certifiable neocon hawk who just a few weeks ago stated that the war was a net positive because Saddam Hussein was a very bad man — this week solemnly declared that he wouldn’t have gone in if he knew the intelligence was wrong. He kindly added that he didn’t think President Bush would have gone in either, which is a joke.
(This piece by Paul Waldman shreds this silly myth that everyone was somehow “fooled” by the intelligence.)
Former “W” staffer Ted Cruz, meanwhile, weighed in with this repudiation of the neoconservative conceit that the whole thing was done to promote democracy (by freeing the Iraqis from their lives). His point of view probably best represents the base of the party: bloodthirsty and vengeful without all that extraneous hoohah about helping the children and letting a thousand flowers grow:
While Cruz said he couldn’t judge then-President Bush’s decision without having seen the intelligence himself, he reiterated his view that America should not get bogged down in nation-building after dispatching threats abroad.
“It is not the job of our soldiers, and sailors and airmen and Marines, to transform foreign nations into democratic utopias, it is the job to hunt down and kill terrorists who want to murder Americans before they can carry out jihad
These people are all distancing themselves however they can from the debacle that was Bush’s war. But the one who is going to have the biggest problem doing that is obviously the guy with the same last name.
Rand Paul is another dynastic scion with a different yet equally difficult problem.