The scariest words you will hear all week
by digby
I wrote about them for Salon today:
With these thirteen simple words GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush struck terror into the entire world yesterday. He said,
“If you want to know who I listen to for advice, it’s him.”
To whom was he referring? As hard as it is to believe, he was talking about his brother, George W. Bush.
Now it’s true that the question referred to Israel and the Middle East specifically, but it doesn’t really matter. There isn’t any area of policy or interest in which it would be smart to make such an admission. After all, it was during George W. Bush’s tenure that we had the nation’s most catastrophic terrorist attack, that we made the most notorious foreign policy blunder in American history, and that we suffered the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression. Indeed, when you look at it that way, you have to give Jeb points for chutzpah, for daring to run at all. It’s only been 7 years since his brother left office with a 34 percent approval rating — which was actually quite an improvement from where he’d been mired for his final year in office. But for Jeb to actually suggest that he would listen to his brother or ask him for advice seems rather reckless.
Read on. It’s actually about the rock and a hard place Bush is in between his brother’s feckless neocon record (and his own past association), his father’s history of hostility to Israel and the need to appease certain donors like Sheldon Adelson. All Republicans are going to have to answer for the GOP’s hawkish foreign policy in light of W’s epic failures of the last decade and try to finesse the division between the bloodthirsty base and the war-weary general public, but Jeb’s got a more complicated course than most.
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