Former 2016 Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said he thinks a Republican should challenge President Donald Trump in next year’s election, arguing the party “ought to be a given a choice.”
“I think someone should run. Just because Republicans ought to be given a choice,” said Bush, who also served as the governor of Florida, in an interview with David Axelrod that will air Saturday on “The Axe Files.” He added that beating Trump in 2020 will be difficult for anyone because “he has a strong, loyal base” and “it’s hard to beat a sitting president.”
“But to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative I think is important,” he added. “And our country needs to have competing ideologies that people — that are dynamic, that focus on the world we’re in and the world we’re moving towards rather than revert back to a nostalgic time.”
A return to Bushism is the real goal of the #NeverTrump crowd. They are Bush loyalists who simply cannot stand the idea that someone could win the Republican nomination without their approval. Jeb’s desire to have people question “what it is to be a conservative” signifies his own belief that an open-borders/pro-amnesty policy is “conservative.”
Bush represents the wing of the GOP that wants an American equivalent of Angela Merkel’s government in Germany, and they consider it morally wrong — racist! — to oppose unlimited immigration. They are “conservatives” who don’t conserve anything, except their own prestige.
The general consensus, and also my own personal opinion, is that Marco Rubio was the big winner of Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate on CNBC. Polls have shown Rubio stuck in the second tier behind the two “outsider” candidates who are the current front-runners, Donald Trump and Ben Carson. Rubio is young, smart and articulate, but his role in the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan has hurt him with the GOP’s conservative grassroots. Wednesday night, however, when Rubio was criticized for missing Senate votes while campaigning for president, he counter-attacked sharply:
“In 2008, Barack Obama missed 60 or 70% of his votes and the same newspaper endorsed him again. This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country, between the mainstream media and the conservatives.”
Turning the question around to focus on the pro-Democrat double standard of the “mainstream media” was a smart move. Rubio then got a surprise bonus when Jeb Bush called on him to resign, giving Rubio an opening for this brutal jab:
“Jeb, let me tell you, I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position. Someone convinced you attacking me is going to help you.”
Boom! Bush’s campaign had been on the ropes and if he thought he could make a comeback by attacking Rubio, he thought wrong. This move was both “strategically ill-conceived and tactically incompetent,” to quote Jonathan Last of the Weekly Standard.
Now, what does this mean? To make clear my own preference, I support any candidate not named “Hillary Clinton.” After eight years of Obama’s presidency, it is crucial for America’s future that the Democrats not get a third term, and I will be willing to back whoever gets the GOP nomination. Trump, Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul, whoever. Everybody knows my longstanding support for Rick Santorum, and I do not rule out the possibility that Rick might yet pull off another Iowa miracle like he did in 2012. However, the main thing — the Big Picture — is that all of the Republican candidates are better than Hillary and, in a few weeks, voters in Iowa are going to reduce the oversized GOP field down to four or maybe five viable candidates.
Marco Rubio could be one of those. Jeb Bush certainly will not.
Bush is done. He is over, doomed, kaput, finito. If the Republican Establishment big money boys can’t see that, they’re even dumber than I previously thought they were, and I have always thought Stupid Guys With Too Much Money were the root cause of the GOP’s electoral and political problems. Their hopes for a restoration of the Bush dynasty — because this is what Stupid Guys With Too Much Money dream of, like a 12-year-old girl dreams of dating Harry Styles — are now at an end. It’s time to wake up and smell the futility.
So a half-dozen GOP Establishment consultants will soon be unemployed after Jeb gives his “spend more time with my family” speech, and this is good news for America. We will be spared another Bush, and can now focus our attention on avoiding another Clinton.
. . .newspapers failed to see the big picture: At a conference [CPAC] that brings together conservative leaders from around the country, Mr. Bush was soundly booed and heckled. A packed room booed his stance on immigration — he called for “a path to legal status” for illegal aliens — and derided his support of Common Core as the soon-to-be candidate said the program does not amount to a federal takeover of education.
Even though Mr. Bush — as awkward as his brother when delivering speeches from teleprompters — had opted for a simple Q&A with a “friendly” moderator, Fox News’ Sean Hannity, there were plenty of disastrous moments, like when he was asked about his support, as governor, for offering drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens, which drew more boos.
It is blatantly obvious to even the most casual observer that, if you’re conservative and your name doesn’t rhyme with “trove” or “Hindu Kush”, your interest in Jeb hovers around that of contracting ebola.
But who else is keen? Why, Hillary, getting her grandma on there at her Georgetown estate. What better way to party like it’s 1992 than trick the GOP into nominating Jeb?
The narrative repositions Obama as “More of Same (Bush)” vice “Hope and Change”
Her Majesty, the victim of masculine oppression, barely held back the coming Russian night, and could have succeeded, if not for those meddling White House kids. Just look at how pear shaped things have gone since she left?
The American voters have a chance to un-soil themselves, after so disrespectfully rejecting HillaryCare in the ’90s. You got what you deserved in ObamaCare, ungrateful peasants, but now the wise and forgiving Hillary gonna wipe a boo-boo.
Fine print:
And if you godforsaken little Vast Right Wing Conspirators manage to thwart Her Majesty again, then the very Tribulation itself shall have been a trip to Disney World compared to her wrath. So you’d better tell that Cheese Head governor twerp to lay by his dish and let Jeb join Dole, McCain, and Romney in the Concession Speech Chorus, m’kay?
it seems that just about everyone else is obsessed with Palin’s presidential prospects, and that includes a certain Ed Rollins, who holds forth today on CNN.com with a piece titled, “Palin, I knew Reagan. You’re no Reagan.”
Well.
There is much to mock about a piece on Gov. Palin’s supposed lack of presidential qualifications, especially coming from a man who once tried to help win the presidency for H. Ross Perot, who was not only unqualified but also insane.
Jennifer Caballero at Liberty Pundits asks the all-too-obvious question:
Bingo, Jen. Whatever your opinion of Sarah Palin, the problem is that nearly all her most prominent critics are professional operatives of one sort or another. If they are not already on the payroll of some prospective 2012 GOP presidential candidate, then they are presumably seeking such work. And they know they can get headlines and ingratiate themselves to those prospective employers by publishing anti-Palin rants.
The real danger here, as I’ve said before, is that this relentless Palin-bashing from within the GOP can have no good result. Either (a) Palin wins the nomination anyway, in which case the GOP 2012 nominee will have been damaged by all these friendly-fire attacks, or (b) someone else will win the nomination as the beneficiary of a none-too-subtle “Anybody But Sarah” campaign in the primaries. And then good luck getting those people energized for the general election.
Only Sarah Palin can beat Sarah Palin. And let me tell you why no one will take her on. Her defenders and supporters, the likes of Rush Limbaugh and people I admire, are so powerful on the right that nobody wants to anger any of those people, nobody wants to end up in the crosshairs, and nobody wants to look like they are unwilling to let her do her thing. I don’t think people should be, you know, uptight and angsting about Sarah Palin. I think she’ll reveal herself, and people will love her or hate her. I really believe that if it looked like she were about to become the nominee, or, heaven forbid, the leader of the free world, a whole lot of people would stand up and say a whole lot of things.
Understand one thing: Nicolle Wallace is Team Bush all the way. She is speaking for, and serving the interests of, the Bush wing of the GOP. I’ve long warned that there is a Jeb 2012 bandwagon geared up and ready to roll at a moment’s notice, if Jeb decides to take a shot at it. If that doesn’t happen, the Bushies are trying to keep their thumb on the scale, to make sure that whoever gets the 2012 nomination, it’s someone acceptable to them.
But the Bushies know that, whatever else happens, it’s all over for them if Sarah Palin gets the 2012 nomination. Establishment phonies like Nicolle Wallace will be persona non grata to a Palin-led Republican Party.
Just keep that in mind. There’s a lot more going on behind the scenes of the GOP than most grassroots conservatives suspect.
P.S.:Ed Rollins? Dude worked on the Huffington ’94 Senate campaign.
