He called for all involved to “suspend and delay” any assistance “until these atrocities end, or at the very least until regarded as under control by U.S. authorities, and normalcy is restored.”

He continued, “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor,” he said, "and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

Okay, so you’d think the Bush Boys would know that they do not have the necessary genes appropriate to conveying parables, metaphors, or, for that matter, speaking English proficiently.

But ya gotta give them an A for effort.

You know the metaphor where you put a frog in a pan of cold water and slowly turn up the heat? And how the frog will not notice and allow itself to eventually boil?

Jeb! tried to explain the United States slipping into the horrific evil of something-or-other, and decided that a megaphone would be just grand.

Then, Mr. Bush went for the frog metaphor. And that’s where the problem for him began.

“It’s like the crabs in the, you know, whatever —the crabs in the boiling water,” Mr. Bush tried.

“Frogs,” an audience member shouted out, helpfully.

“The frogs,” Mr. Bush continued. “You think it’s warm, and it feels pretty good and then it feels like you’re in a whirlpool—you know, a Jacuzzi or something.”

He concluded with a morbid twist: “And then you’re dead. That’s how this works.”

By the way, the horrific evil was free college tuition.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published a story that had the politerati abuzz. The headline was bold: "Ben Carson Is Struggling to Grasp Foreign Policy, Advisers Say." The piece reported that the GOP presidential candidate's "remarks on foreign policy have repeatedly raised questions about his grasp of the subject," and it noted that "two of his top advisers said in interviews that he had struggled to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and that intense tutoring was having little effect."
Duane Clarridge, a top adviser to Carson on terrorism and national security, told the Times, "Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East." Ouch.

A particularly intriguing aspect of this dustup was that Carson had turned to Clarridge for foreign policy advice. Often portrayed as a veteran spymaster in the media, Clarridge has indeed had a long career in intelligence, but it has been a checkered one.

Clarridge first achieved public notoriety during the Iran-contra affair—the doozy of a scandal in which President Ronald Reagan secretly sold arms to the terrorist-supporting regime of Iran in order to free American hostages and in which his national security crew used these ill-gotten proceeds to secretly finance the CIA-backed contras who were trying to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. Clarridge, then a top CIA official, played a role in both sides of the conspiracy. He helped White House aide Oliver North use a CIA front company to ship US-made HAWK missiles to Iran. According to the independent counsel who investigated the scandal, he also sought funding from the apartheid regime of South Africa for the contras, after Congress had cut off assistance for the contras. Clarridge retired from the CIA in 1987 after being formally reprimanded for his involvement in the Iran weapons deal.

But there was worse blowback to come. In 1991, independent counsel Lawrence Walsh charged Clarridge for lying to congressional investigators and a presidential commission about his role in the trading-arms-for-hostages skullduggery. Essentially, after news of the clandestine deal with Tehran broke, Walsh alleged, Clarridge had repeatedly lied to investigators, claiming that he had not known that the shipments he had helped North arrange contained weapons. Clarridge had stuck to the cover story that these shipments involved oil drilling equipment. Walsh asserted, "There was strong evidence that Clarridge's testimony was false."

Walsh also pointed out that Clarridge had falsely testified when he had told government investigators that he had not known about Reagan administration efforts (arguably illegal) to seek secret financial aid from other countries for the contras and and that he himself had not sought such funds for the contras. Walsh maintained that CIA cables proved that Clarridge had misled investigators about this. Yet Walsh did not bring perjury charges against Clarridge for these allegedly false statements, noting the reasons for sidelining this portion of the case were classified.