Umm ... pass?
To get a feel for just how badly Jeb Bush is doing on the campaign trail, all you need to know is that he's been getting his ass handed to him during interviews with Fox News personalities. On the topic of whether or not the Iraq War was a mistake. You know, the single most obvious question the world might have for the brother of George W. Bush, the one that Jeb Bush has had his entire campaign to craft an answer to, in between meetings with billionaires in an effort to secure access to their checkbooks before any of the other candidates latch onto them.
It started Monday during a softball interview with Megyn Kelly. She asked the Most Obvious Question: Knowing what we now know, would you have authorized the invasion? Bush either misheard the question or simply dodged it in order to answer a question he liked better, depending on how charitable you're feeling towards him.
“I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got. In retrospect the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty. And in retrospect once we invaded and took out Saddam Hussein, we didn’t focus on security first.”
This caused some stir, because even the dullest of warmongers are generally smart enough to stay away from the
would you have invaded Iraq even knowing that our pretenses for it were total bunk debate. So Jeb's task on Tuesday was to explain that he had "interpreted the question wrong", and maybe have another go at answering that very same question. The one he knew he was going to be asked. The one that he has an entire team of campaign strategists and advisers advising him on.
Swing and a miss:
"Yeah, I don't know what that decision would've been," Bush responded. "That's a hypothetical but the simple fact was mistakes were made, as they always are in life and foreign policy. So we need to learn from the past to make sure we're strong and secure going forward."
Would you have launched a military invasion of a foreign nation if you knew the intelligence that justified it was complete bunk? Golly gee, that's a hard question, Sean. Maybe I would have invaded anyway, maybe I wouldn't. But
mistakes were made, am I right? Now let's just all move on with our lives.
Surely, Jeb Bush knows that when he is running for president he is very likely to be asked about the decisions made by his own brother, the Worst President Ever, and the Republican administration that launched a war so fabulously expensive that our great-grandchildren will still be sending in payments for it after Miami has disappeared under the rising seas. He has a staff for these things. There are focus groups that can focus on it. By gum, there is an entire Republican infrastructure devoted to crafting palatable phrases for things you don't want to say out loud. If you're running for President of the United States you probably would want to have an answer to that even if you weren't the immediate family member of the guy who f---ed up these things the last time around.
Instead Jeb acts like each time any (obsequiously friendly) pundit asks him the Most Obvious Question is the first time it's ever come up. Why, what a good question, MegynSean. I wonder why nobody in the nation has ever thought of asking what my opinion on that would be. I shall have to contemplate that, at some point. Whoops, gotta go now.
There's two possibilities afoot here. First, that Jeb Bush really, really does not want to tick his brother off, to the extent that he's willing to act like a chump in national interviews—perhaps he frets that if breaks with George on this one, Dubya will retaliate by painting some particularly unflattering pictures of him? Or second, Jeb Bush is genuinely just stumped by the question of whether we should have invaded Iraq even knowing, as we know now, that each of the rationales for that invasion were flatly wrong.
God help us—what if he really is the dumber of the two brothers?