A little over a week ago, Fox News aired an exclusive interview with Jeb Bush. It has caused a stir. Jeb has yet to announce officially that he is running for President, even though it is perfectly obvious that he is running whole hog for President. Didn’t he take part in the Sheldon Adelson Primary, after all? What could be more grotesquely Presidential than that? Welcome to the horror show known as the 2016 U.S. election cycle.
Campaigns for the U.S. Congress and Senate or for the White House are underway constantly, year in and year out. We are being subjected to non-stop mendacity and fundraising by the mediocre and the misguided. CNN and Fox are having a field day, fixating upon the trivial and transient, pretending to take the passing show seriously.
That is a problem one must adjust to. Accordingly, I did not give the Fox Noise, eh, News, interview a second glance. Jeb has been flip-flopping like a boated baby tuna off the coast of Key Largo ever since. So I’ve revisited the original interview. It is indeed curious.
With respect to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Jeb is at sea, just like his brother before him. Jeb does not know what he is talking about. Why should he? Jeb is a golfer and a businessman. More importantly, he doesn’t seem to care. The whole Iraq invasion/war fiasco does not seem to have made a dent upon him as a human being.
Could Jeb still be a cynical turd, to employ his own colorful description, as he was when he attended Andover? No, he has moved on. There is more to it than that. Words are coming out of his mouth in the May 10th interview with Megyn Kelly, but they do not compute.
He repeats the standard Neocon/Dick Cheney cover story, which boils down to this: CIA Director George “slam dunk” Tenet is ultimately responsible for the invasion of Iraq. Well, what would you expect GW’s brother to say under these circumstances? “Operation Iraqi Freedom” has turned out to be a very expensive and bloody train wreck. The Middle East is a killing field. There was no civil war in Iraq, no chaos, no terrorism, no internecine religious war, and no training ground for terrorists prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.