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Attorney in Texas

(3,373 posts) Fri Aug 14, 2015, 09:13 PM Aug 2015

Jon Soltz: "Embarrassing Jeb Bush Flip-Flops on Iraq, Again"

excerpts from a great and insightful editorial:

By his collapsing poll numbers, despite his intense campaigning, we know that Jeb Bush might be one of the worst candidates of all time. But, sometimes, bad politicians make good elected officials. So, the question remains, would Jeb Bush make a good Commander in Chief?

No.

I had planned to write an op-ed critiquing his major foreign policy speech from this week, in which Bush falsely pinned blame for ISIS on President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and gave a terrible vision of what he would do different. ... But, as Jeb Bush is prone to do, he stepped all over his speech just 24 hours later by saying, "I'll tell you, taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal." Thus, Jeb erased the entire speech he just delivered.... If he truly thinks that it was a "good deal" for us, then he also must believe that he's lying when he says that he wouldn't have launched the war in Iraq, knowing then what we do now.... With his brother's neoconservative advisors by his side, we can't be shocked that this is his real position. Yet, in the debate and his speech this week, he went through great pains to say he'd avoid the war in Iraq. They say a gaffe is when a politician tells you what they really think. I've never seen a clearer example of that, than in Jeb's latest comment.

...

That Jeb considers this -- in any way -- to be a good deal for the United States is the core of why Jeb Bush is not qualified to be the Commander in Chief. Anyone who thinks the war in Iraq was a "pretty good deal" should be nowhere near the command structure of the United States military, ordering our men and women in uniform into harm's way, lest they send our men and women to sacrifice their lives for another neoconservative failure.