I wonder how our medal totals would be if we had an exclusionary immigration system which we have had for the last few years. My heart swells for all of our medalists, including those whose families have come from far off lands to love our country.
It’s hard to believe that it was only a couple of weeks ago that Jeb Bush called the Trump presidency “exhausting”, thus confirming the “low energy” moniker given him by Trump during the Republican primaries. He continued: “…it feels like the whole world has been turned upside down,” comments reminiscent of the ponderous deficit spending implemented by President George W. Bush in the face of the financial crisis.
But in terms of today’s news cycle Bush’s comments occurred back in the Precambrian era. The week that was featured deadly protests in Charlottesville, a war on history Confederate memorials and to cleanse the palate, a solar eclipse. The Washington Post, where Democracy Dies in Darkness or something, was curiously pro-eclipse. Personally I was unimpressed: it reminded me, if anything, of when my phone transitions to power-saving mode.
The last 24 hours has convinced me that Washington DC is the worst place in the world. I am not going to defend the Trump comments, but I will not stand by and let hypocrisy go unnoticed. Jeb Bush sent out this tweet today. I have had it with the Bush family and their hypocrisy. Jeb Bush gave Hillary Clinton a freaking medal on the first anniversary of the Benghazi attacks. Jeb Bush awarded Hillary Clinton the medal and said, “Former Secretary Clinton has dedicated her life to serving and engaging people across the world in democracy.” I am sorry, but that statement offends me more than anything Trump said to Access Hollywood. Jeb Bush celebrated a women who spent the majority of her public life destroying the women that Bill Clinton abused, but you don’t hear that condemnation from Jeb or the rest of the Bush Family. I am so sick and tired of the Bush family. The entitlement, the selective outrage, and moral preening have all become too much. They need to go far far away. If you won’t condemn the Clinton’s and their abuse of women then I won’t listen when you criticize Trump. The Bush’s will never criticize the Clinton’s because they are in the same disgusting Washington DC power club.
I am repulsed by everything about our political culture. The Colin Powell hacked emails seem to reveal that everyone in DC knows the truth about the Clinton’s, but they are too gutless to really oppose them. Colin Powell was more worried about Clinton taking money away from his own speaking fees. The outrage about Trump statements and the silence about Hillary Clinton actions are so disheartening. I would hope to live in a world where both Clinton and Trump would be drummed out of politics, but that will never happen. I would settle for Trump holding a 2 hour long press conference calling out the Clinton’s for all of their crimes and then dropping out. If a person condemns Trump and condones Clinton then they are hypocrites.
Jeb Bush was interviewed by former GOP strategist Nicolle Wallace about his decision in November. And it appears he is both #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary.
“I’ve watched history unfold with kind of a front row seat,” said the former candidate, still smarting from his disastrous primary campaign. “The simple fact is there’s a threshold past which anybody who steps in the Oval Office must go past. And I don’t think either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump go past that threshold.”
Jeb Bush by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0.
I never took Jeb Bush’s campaign seriously because it seemed like such an obviously bad idea: Bush hadn’t been elected to office in nearly a decade, during which time he’d made a name for himself by championing a singularly unpopular education policy (Common Core) and admonishing the party on the one issue it had previously shown itself willing to go into full opposition on (illegal immigration). Moreover, there’s the whole business of his last name, about which… well, I hardly need say more. As many predicted, his lead evaporated upon contact with voters and his $155M war chest earned him not a single delegate. And while I can’t say this with certainty, I’m confident that things wouldn’t have panned out very differently for Bush if Donald Trump hadn’t run (how Trump’s candidacy would have fared without Bush is an interesting question). Republican voters just weren’t hankering for another Bush, let alone Jeb.
I thought my iPad was hacked when the WSJ notification popped-up earlier this morning, so I searched the Internet. And what do you know? Jeb Bush endorsed Senator Ted Cruz for president this morning.
Am I the only Ricochet member outraged that the Republican Party big shots blew $100 million on Jeb Bush? A year ago, I could have told anyone who asked the result of attempting to foist another Bush on an electorate still walloped by the last: Zilch. One hundred million dollars turned into the kind of floating dust that can only be seen when it’s hit by direct sunlight. Are we all so rich that the waste of tens of millions of dollars is no big deal to us? Where is the outrage (I know, I know, a rhetorical question)? I don’t even mean to pick on Bush, who is merely the latest recipient of the party’s foolishly spent, misdirected largesse. I’m not bitter, just outraged.
But whereas the Republican party has lots of money and no imagination, I have the opposite. So indulge me in a thought experiment: A little over a year ago, the Republican party bosses came to me with a briefcase full of money and said “Dex, we recognize your personal beauty, masculine prowess, and superior wisdom. Please take this $100 million and do what you will. We trust it entirely to you. Feel free to take out $99,999,999.00 for your salary. Whatever you do, it’ll be better than what we come up with.”
I was in no mood to haggle, so I thanked them and put the cash in escrow while I drew up the following budget (quietly returning 100% of my salary to the budget).
For those who are worried that there is no hope of avoiding a Trump victory, I offer the following graph of opinion polls leading up to the South Carolina Republican primary. This is hardly ideal data, but it is the best we have, and it does seem to reflect what happened in the final vote.
The magenta line is Rubio; the dark blue line near the bottom is Kasich; the black line is Cruz; and, most importantly, the blue line at the top is Trump. I’ve put a vertical line on February 11, because it was clearly an inflection point with sudden shifts in many of the candidates’ slopes. And, beautifully, you can see that the Trump blue line near the top starts sloping down.
So, here it is — in the first national poll taken entirely after the most recent Republican debate — Ted Cruz leads Donald Trump 28% to 26%, and Marco Rubio comes in third at 17%.
I would like to believe it. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But is it plausible? Trump has been ahead now in 31 consecutive national polls.
If you type jebbush.com into your browser it now redirects to Trump’s website after Jeb forgot to renew (or failed to ever register) this domain name. Trump announced it on Twitter, but the Tweet is no longer visible.
This gives a whole new twist on Eminent Domain.
Over at The Weekly Standard today, Bill Kristol put up poll results from South Carolina. Although the pollster wished to remain anonymous, Bill explained, he was unaffiliated with any of the campaigns and is both “honest” and “competent.” Here’s where his work indicates that matters now stand:
Before I started digging into this post, it was very hard for me to understand how one could support Marco Rubio while finding Jeb Bush unacceptable. Viscerally, both of them favor mass immigration, cheap foreign labor, and foreign intervention. As I dug in a little bit, I discovered there were, at the margins, some differences between the two men.
They both favor some moderate tax cuts but not overhauling the tax code; in line with what every Republican candidate of the last 24 years has proposed; although Jeb said in 2012 he was open to tax increases if they came with spending cuts.
Trump’s theatrics aside, perhaps the most entertaining (and revealing) episode of this primary season features Jeb Bush. On the stump this Tuesday, Jeb regurgitated a string of poorly memorized sound bites (“I won’t be an agitator-in-chief … I won’t be out there blowhardin’, talkin’, er, a big game… “) and then, at the height of a crescendo that failed to move a soul, he prompted the crowd to “please clap.”
Over at the Ricochet Member Feed, Brian Watt’s link to the clip is appropriately entitled: “Very Sad. Jeb Please Just Stop. You’re An Embarrassment.”
Jeb was supposed to be the statesman in this race — a problem-solver who, if too much of policy wonk, at least was a man with gravitas. Now, his campaign in tatters, Jeb has been exposed as somewhat of an impostor, and a dangerous one at that. In the face of Trump’s blustery oversimplifications, Jeb could not even begin to articulate why Trump was wrong. Jeb appeared as the “establishment” par excellence — well-credentialed, well-bred, but dependent on mere assertions that he is worthy of the presidency. Jeb thus became the perfect foil to fuel Trump’s rise. Not only harmful as an inadvertent accomplice to Trump-mania, Jeb tries to mount a comeback built around ripping his former protégé, Marco Rubio, perhaps Republicans’ best chance for winning the general election.
Dear Governor Bush,
There are many ways to express your love of country. One is to serve as President. In your case, that path seems closed. Since April, you spent the better part of $15 million in Iowa, yet you came sixth, winning just 2.8 percent of the vote and one delegate. At this rate, you’d need to spend $18,540,000,000 to win the nomination – which is more than even Right to Rise can manage.
There is no shame in losing, of course, and it’s always possible that New Hampshire will shock the world by giving you a victory, but let’s face it, the RealClearPolitics average of New Hampshire polls has you at under 10 percent (under 5 percent nationally), and your donors are panicking. After what was supposed to be a reassuring post-Iowa conference call with your campaign, one donor told Politico, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘rattle of death?’”
I have not been blogging much recently — in part as a consequences of exhaustion (I have been and still am ushering books into print), and in part because I know only one thing about this presidential race: my expectations have repeatedly been proven wrong.
I did write a post on Jeb, expressing my admiration for his accomplishments as Governor of Florida, and indicating wariness, and I did describe the Democratic Party as The Party of the Living Dead. I think that I was right on both counts.
But I will have to confess to you that I did not anticipate the debut of The Donald and, when he appeared on the scene, I figured that he was flash-in-the-pan: this year’s Herman Cain. I read about Ted Cruz’s plan to turn out evangelical voters as never before, and I thought, “That won’t work.” I took note of Hillary’s age and the fact that she seems frequently out of it, and I told myself, “This is a great opportunity for Martin O’Malley. He is the only Democrat in the race with a pulse.”
After Citizens United, leftist jeremiads foretold the death of democracy as Big Dollars™ took over our politics, ushering in an age of plutocracy, avarice, darkness, greed, and doom (for starters). So, how’s that going? Very badly, it seems.
According to the NYT, the Republican candidates have raised about $242 million in direct donations to their campaigns, and their PACs and Super PACs have brought in an additional $312 million. Jeb Bush — Jeb! to his closest friends — raised very nearly 40 percent of that latter figure ($123.7 million), which has, to date, earned him the support of a single delegate via 2.8 percent of caucusers in Iowa. It’s not shaping up much better for him in New Hampshire, where Real Clear Politics expects him to get about 10 percent of the vote. In terms of campaign donations, Bush has raised about $31 million, which puts him behind both Carson and Cruz and just a little ahead of Rubio.
Among the other Republican candidates, Cruz comes in second in both PAC and campaign donations — split fairly evenly — and has raised a total of about $90 million. Rubio has raised $77 million, also fairly evenly split between PACs and campaign donations. Ben Carson has raised an incredible $54 million in donations, but his PACs have relatively little. Donald Trump has raised $19.4 million in donations and has no associated PACs (Trump also has billions of dollars of money in his own right, in case you didn’t know). Christie has raised $26.7 million in total with, interestingly, very nearly the same lopsided PAC-to-campaign ratio as Bush (a little under 4:1)
It’s the day after the Iowa Caucus and start of the election cycle, so I thought I’d list all the campaign platitudes and cliches that have already become a sheer nuisance, beginning with, I will keep America safe.
Okay, national security is obviously a big issue in this campaign, and people want to know what we’re going to do to keep America safe. Fortunately, the candidates have a great message: “We will keep America safe.” Thank God! Marco Rubio plans to keep this country safe — as opposed to Rand Paul, whose campaign slogan is “I hope ISIS wins,” and Bernie Sanders, who’s gone out of his way to emphasize that he’s pro-Putin.
Assuming a political miracle doesn’t happen, and we have just three Republicans running for president by this time next month, who will the other candidates support as they bow-out of the race? My predictions:
I’ve been annoyed at people here responding to Trump criticism with some variation of “I suppose you prefer Jeb! then”, especially since Jeb! has been hovering at 1% in Ricochet polling for a while. Well the pre-caucus poll has been up for a few days, and officially zero Ricochet members have clicked the radio button next to Jeb! for either a first or second choice. So while I’ll continue to be annoyed at the Jeb!/Trump false choice presented elsewhere, from now on I’ll view any mention here as part of a funny in-joke.
I am surprised at this turn of events though. Absolutely everyone else has someone thinking of him or her as a first or second choice. Mike Huckabee, who from the beginning was just selling a book (right?), has people who would vote for him, at least to “send a message” (which I get, I was a Keyes-ster long ago). Any former Jeb! partisans reading? If Jeb! was acceptable–nay, best or second best–a couple weeks ago, what changed?
It’s hard to believe that it was only a couple of weeks ago that 
