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http://www.vanityfair.com/dam/2015/02/Brother%20Dearest.pdf
[font size=5]Brother Dearest[/font]
Vanity Fair, July 2001
David Margolick
p. 94 With George Herbert Walker Bush and George W. Bush, one always gets the feeling of being importuned, of almost being begged to like and respect them. Jeb, by contrast, has the ease of someone who’s not trying to win anyone over, who’s not trying to be someone he’s not or come across as tougher or smarter or more macho than he really is. He needs no pork rinds or cowboy boots to earn his spurs. He seems to now he will be liked and respected – there is no way he can’t be – and if he is not, well, then maybe that person is just not worth being liked and respected back. ....
p. 96 At the same time, Jeb finds himself saddled with labels never attached to his father and brother – such words as arrogant, stubborn, cocksure, self-righteous. ....
Stories abound of retribution meted out to anyone who displeases Jeb. ....
(Democratic mayor of Tallahassee Scott) Maddox says. “If you’re always used to being given what you want, you react poorly when you are opposed. ...” ....
Critics say that Jeb doesn’t listen to other people, that he’s a zealot surrounded by sycophants. “He’s not getting very much information,” says Tom Rossin, the Democratic leader in the state senate, “first, because he doesn’t listen to it; second, because he’s a one-way guy, and the people who really argue with him somehow disappear.”
p. 142 He’s tired, too, of the usual bait and switch: journalists claiming they want to explore bond issues when their real agenda is to talk psychobabble and to stoke sibling rivalry. Forced to speak about his family, Jeb has perfected the pre-emptive platitude. He loves his (pick it) brother/father/wife/children “more than life.” He’s “incredibly proud” of them all. And no superlative is ever too strong: he once said his father was “as close to perfection as a human being can be.” ....
p. 143 With few exceptions, Jeb’s relatives don’t speak. Jeb’s staffers are young, inexperience, and ferociously loyal; they are often compared to a cult. (“Shiite Republicans is what one Democrat calls them.) ....
None of his friends were invited to the wedding. “She came from a totally different culture, a different planet from our perspective,” one college classmate recalls.
p. 144 He met Armando Codina, a prominent Cuban-American real-estate developer and one of the Senior Bush’s earliest supporters; Codina made him an extraordinary offer, particularly for someone with no experience in real estate: join him, invest no money, and have “Bush” added to the company name (at the very time that Bush Sr became vice president).
p. 145 Some $2000 million in Medicaid funds was missing, and Recarey was indicted for conspiracy, bribery, obstruction of justice, and illegal wiretapping. He fled the country in September 1987 and is still listed as a fugitive. Asked about Recarey in 1998, Jeb said he’s less gullible now. Similarly, in 1990,Jeb lobbied his father’s administration and helped win parole for Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro terrorist widely suspected of blowing up a Cuban jetliner in 1976 with 73 passengers aboard. “he is one of us,” Jorge Mas Canosa, the late strongman of Miami’s Cuban community, said of Jeb.
Asked what he would do for Florida’s blacks, Bush gave a slightly longer and more nuanced answer that was reduced to an oft cited, poisonous sound bite: “probably nothing.” Although Jeb himself had used plenty of government help amassing his own fortune, he questioned how much anyone else needed it. ....
...most benefactors (donors) were Republican Party stalwarts: U.S. Sugar, Outback Steakhouse, Philip Morris, Eckerd Corp. Blockbuster founder and Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga, and Al Hoffman Jr., later general fiance chairman of Jeb’s second gubernatorial campaign and now fiance chairman of the Republican National Committee. ....
p. 146 ...the most famous footage ever of Jeb Bush, in which, talking to an aide and unaware that the cameras are rolling, the smoldering governor hisses, “Kick ... their ... asses ... out!” Jeb later said that it was to the press, and not to the two black legislators, that he had been referring. ....
p. 147 ...suggestions that Jeb and Cynthia Henderson were an item were all over Tallahassee... .... ...she kept moving up in his administration despite a set of scandals and ethical lapses that would have doomed anyone else. ....
Even Jeb’s allies say that he and Columba have little in common and that she is abusive both to him and to his aides, especially if they happen to be pretty women.
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