The sum total of harm done to the United States and the world by the Bush family is incalculable, but if it ever could be tallied, it would be stunning. (Oh So True!) With their friends in Saudi Arabia, their science-denying brethren in the energy fraternity, their network of well-born corporatists and exploiters of people and the planet, the Bush bunch were culprits in innumerable crimes against humanity, a family of mediocrities who, as Molly Ivins once said of "Shrub," were "born on Third Base, but thought they'd hit a home run." Were it not for their perch of privilege, few in this family would have ever flown higher than the level of that aforementioned middle manager, scorned by those he was paid to supervise....
...probably the most significant reason Jeb! is not worthy of anyone's pity is because his message to Republican voters was, at base, little different from the troglodytic Ted Cruz, the inflammatory Donald Trump, the "defund Planned Parenthood" John Kasich, or the oily Marco Rubio, his empty-suit protégé. With a coterie of advisors that included so many of the neo-cons who "served" his brother, Jeb!'s candidacy merely proved that though the American right was utterly untethered from both reality and decency, they didn't want their views represented in yet another sequel to Dum and Dummer.I don't pity Jeb! Bush, but I do find him pretty pitiable. And pitiful. I mean it's big time pitiful when a whole country makes it plain that it likes you even less than it likes your baby brother, the guy who overlooked a looming attack on what were then the two tallest buildings in the world, bumped the national debt up by several trillion dollars, fucked up things even worse in a part of the world that was already a lot fucked up before he made it worse, bungled a big natural disaster in New Orleans, tanked the economy, wiped out the home equity of tens of millions of Americans, and made the U.S. look irredeemably thuggish as he presided over Abu Ghraib and the program of medieval torture that Cheney and crew had euphemized as "enhanced interrogation."
Even Republicans demonstrated that they had the intelligence and perspicacity to reject this "smarter" brother, this "moderate" among 'em, a guy who was described, by himself and others, as a "leader" and a "great leader," though the result of his leadership was most notable for his ability to help deliver the state he was governing at the time to his baby brother who would, once he was POTUS, preside over the biggest foreign attack on U.S. soil in our history. Despite that minor glitch, however, Jeb! would insist that his brother "kept us safe." By "us," he must have meant the Bush family. He couldn't have meant the nation.
I don't pity Jeb!, though it's hard to imagine or remember a presidential candidate who ever looked more embarrassingly pitiful, more dopey and out of it, more craven in his appeal to voters. Though he was known in prep school as something of a dope-smoking bully, as a presidential candidate, he seemed like the kind of kid who would attract bullies, the kind of pasty-faced prick who oozed an arrogant sense of entitlement that just demanded a smack upside the head.
This was the guy, lest we forget, who approved a public shaming bill for unwed mothers in the state he'd been elected to oversee. This was the "moderate" who injected himself into the middle of the Terry Schiavo case, a painful family drama featuring a woman in a vegetative state who Jeb! decreed should be kept alive at all cost, even over the objections of her family who thought she had suffered enough. There was no hope at all for her recovery, but Jeb! knew better. Thinking he could score cheap points with the pro-life evangelicals in his state, he took a stand he figured would be seen as "courageous" leadership, casting himself as a fierce defender of a life that was, for all intents and purposes, over but for the machines that prolonged the agony for those who truly loved and cared for the suffering woman in the bed.
This was the guy, lest we forget, who continued to think that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was a helluva good idea, much as his younger brother had thought then-FEMA director, Michael Brown, had done a "helluva job, Brownie," during the badly bungled response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
This was the latest in a dynastic line of disastrous people who had all done very well for themselves, thank you very much, once the patriarch, Prescott Bush, had cocooned his progeny in money and privilege. George W. Bush, for example, was allowed to fuck around for decades before getting off booze and coke just in time to be given an oil company, a sports franchise, and the governorship of the state of Texas, a place where the governor doesn't actually have to do much. And Dubya didn't, except for using that job as a launching pad to the presidency where he mostly turned over the reins of power to his daddy's right hand man, Dick Cheney.
The Bushes were always the rather dimwitted handmaidens to the oligarchy, the damaged-DNA guys who could never quite master their native tongue, but could be depended upon to do the bidding of the very, very rich. So, the first thing Dubya did when he took his place as POTUS was to give a huge tax break to the class that had engineered his election.
Jeb! assured us, without quite saying so, that if elected, he would give us the Same Old Shit—more breaks for his peeps and posse, more wars, more money for military contractors, more bones thrown to the misbegotten fascists and racists he and his family had done so much to foster, dating all the way back to the Willie Horton ads that had helped scare white folks into voting "Pappy" into the Oval Office in the '80s. George Herbert Walker Bush was the guy who had called Reagan's trickle-down ideas "voodoo economics" before taking up the VP slot in that sainted Republican's administration and then putting his shoulder to the wheel that rolled down on most American while they were waiting to be trickled upon.
For his part, Jeb! made lots of money for doing very, very little. Like others among the autocrats and oligarchs, he was appointed to various boards and commissions that required almost nothing of him except to attend an occasional meeting in a board room somewhere, sign off on what was going on, then get a six or seven figure check, plus whatever inside info might help ensure that the gravy train kept making scheduled stops at Jeb!'s door.
So, though he surely looked pitiful when he spent more than a hundred million dollars of donor money in his pathetic bid to follow in the footsteps of his dad and his brother, it's impossible to pity this guy, a man who looks like the boss we all had at one time or another, convinced of how terrific he was, but utterly clueless of how he was seen by his employees, derided and joked about in the lunchroom or on the shop floor when they were sure he couldn't hear them and retaliate. That exclamation mark some campaign hack decided to put at the end of his first name is the perfect symbol of how pitiful Jeb! was, an obvious attempt to replace the Bush name with a meaningless bit of punctuational bravado. If there was ever a man whose persona didn't seem consistent with an exclamation mark, it was surely Jeb!
The sum total of harm done to the United States and the world by the Bush family is incalculable, but if it ever could be tallied, it would be stunning. With their friends in Saudi Arabia, their science-denying brethren in the energy fraternity, their network of well-born corporatists and exploiters of people and the planet, the Bush bunch were culprits in innumerable crimes against humanity, a family of mediocrities who, as Molly Ivins once said of "Shrub," were "born on Third Base, but thought they'd hit a home run." Were it not for their perch of privilege, few in this family would have ever flown higher than the level of that aforementioned middle manager, scorned by those he was paid to supervise.
Yet another reason for withholding pity from the pitiful Jeb! is the fact that he is obviously wallowing in sufficient self pity not to need more from anyone else.
But probably the most significant reason Jeb! is not worthy of anyone's pity is because his message to Republican voters was, at base, little different from the troglodytic Ted Cruz, the inflammatory Donald Trump, the "defund Planned Parenthood" John Kasich, or the oily Marco Rubio, his empty-suit protégé. With a coterie of advisors that included so many of the neo-cons who "served" his brother, Jeb!'s candidacy merely proved that though the American right was utterly untethered from both reality and decency, they didn't want their views represented in yet another sequel to Dum and Dummer.
So long and good riddance, Jeb! Bush. Wasn't glad to see ya, wouldn't want to be ya, even with all the money that got you much farther than you could ever have gone without it.
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