I nominate this for Tweet of the Decade:
Oh so NOW Jeb Bush is willing to pull the plug when someone's on life support.
— Ken Jennings (@KenJennings) February 21, 2016
Watching Jeb Bush concede last night just brought up so much pent up anger that I have built over my life toward that family that I really need to do something to try to control it.
If I start ranting about what the Bush family has done to their party, this country, and to millions of people around the world, I may never stop ranting.
That Jeb was one of the reasonable people vying for the nomination is such an insult to humanity that I could easily vomit an ocean’s worth of bile and flood Kennebunkport completely in my sick.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/iraqis-celebrate-as-threat-of-third-bush-presidency-i
s-over
When satire is so true that it’s not satire.
Or funny.
Thanks Lucidamente, Things are maybe looking up at least for the Baghdadis! Less so for the USA with Trump in the offing getting closer to shore. Clinton isn’t especially a prize either.
Could not get more apt.
Substitute “family” for “music” here and you have my sentiments re. Jeb!:
I’m not celebrating until they have chosen another VP candidate.
So who would be a good VP candidate if Rubio wins the nomination? He’ll need someone older, more experienced in DC, with some foreign policy chops. Sound like Cheney? No, I guess Kasich.
Not to mention experience fixing elections in Florida. That leaves Bolton or Cheney or JEB! or Baker or….
at least Scalia isn’t available.
Wouldn’t they be looking to Nikki Haley?
These are Republicans. If they have Rubio on the ticket they won’t go any more ethnic. Think more Joni Ernst the hog castratrix.
Trump’s going to get HUUUUGE support from non-whites. The Whites have it all figured out:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2016/02/21/3751882/trump-sc-general-election/
“I would say Donald Trump has the most business experience and financial experience of probably all the candidates put together,” said Kirk Trussell, of Oconee County, South Carolina. “He’s created tens of thousands of jobs. If we can put people back to work again like Ronald Reagan did, all voters will rise with the tide of the economic flow upwards… Everybody will flourish.”
…
“We still need to take care of the people who need help — the disadvantaged, the ones who are stuck in the ghettos,” he continued. “I think Donald Trump is a compassionate man and I think he will address their situations as well.”
…
Denny Childers of Spartanburg also said Trump’s promises of jobs and higher pay should appeal to Latinos and black voters. And Ron Jolly of Spartanburg said any minority voter who actually listens to Trump’s message would support him.
“Just vote for the best person,” Steve Jobe told ThinkProgress. “It doesn’t matter if he’s white, black, Hispanic, just vote for the best person.”
…
“If you take it out of context like the mass media took it out of context — he didn’t say all Mexican people were bad,” Trussell said. “He said there’s a lot of criminals coming over the border, which is a true fact. That doesn’t include the 95 percent of them who aren’t criminals.”
But even while voters talked about Trump’s general election appeal, they continued to disparage the same groups of people that Trump has attacked. Ryan MacMillan of Spartanburg said he agrees with Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
“From his standpoint, we don’t know who’s coming over here,” he said. “If you had powerful rattlesnakes and you said, well some of them may bite you but you don’t know, are you going to let those powerful rattlesnakes come in your house? No you’re not.”
A recent poll found that 60 percent of South Carolina Republicans support banning Muslims from entering the United States, 29 percent support shutting down U.S. mosques, 47 percent support creating a national database of Muslims, and 25 percent support banning Islam in the United States.
“I have a Muslim friend myself and I’m not worried about him biting me,” MacMillan continued. “But [Trump] was just speaking the truth. We don’t know who’s coming in.”
Don’t stop believing, Trump supporters. Cliven Bundy may be in jail, but his essential political views have taken over the GOP. Because let’s face it, supporters of Cruz and even Rubio also harbor most of these views.
Tell us how you REALLY feel! ;o)
Tell us how you really feel, Boo.
This family has been a cancer on the body politic since the beginning. With George W. Bush it metastasized and came close to mutating us into a fascist State. “W” certainly disgraced our best values throughout the globe. Wars of choice based on lies, with torture mixed in, have a way of doing that.
The family is also the Gift (“Poison” in German) that keeps on giving, since W’s legacy has enabled Trump to “take it to the next level” with public, unashamed professions of fascism and torture as public policy.
I do not mourn “Jeb!” and his misspent millions. If anything, he came across as even more craven and stupid than his older brother.
With apologies to Hemingway. “For sale: exclamation point, never used.”
An awesome day for the USA,
the Bushes have finally gone away!
Let all good people kneel and pray,
“Dear Lord, please keep that clan at bay,
so no Bush, Shrub, or Sapling may
grow e’re again in the D.C. clay”
Well said …well said!!
The sad part: GHWB was the second-best (second-least-horrible?) Republican President since Teddy.
Strongly object on behalf of candidates Taft, Hoover and Eisenhower. Hoover was of course a horrible failure, but it was an extreme situation that he was in no way to blame for, and his approach wasn’t that different from FDR’s initial approach. Eisenhower gave us Nixon, I guess, but it wasn’t on purpose.
Nice Wiki summary of the G.H.W. Bush administration:
Invading Panama with heavy metal.
Well, Ike was the one better/less-worse than GHWB. At least Bush started wars that would end quickly and cost very little in lives or treasure. And he did dial back the military to a degree that no Democrat could have.
Hoover gets very few points from me for being stupid rather than evil.
I could go with Taft… so two mediocre-to-decent Presidents in the last 103 (instead of 107) years. They must be so proud.
Sorry, I think we’re talking about a different Hoover here. Herbert Clark Hoover was not stupid. He was an American hero with a lifetime of achievements. However because of his ideology he was ill-equipped to deal with the Great Depression.
Though I will just point out that the beginning of construction of Hoover Dam, one of the icons of the New Deal, was in 1931.
http://www.history.com/topics/new-deal/pictures/new-deal-programs/hoover-dam-2
Correct that Hoover’s political/economic ideology severely handicapped him in deal with the depression. But for a Republican he wasn’t asleep at the wheel.
THIS article IS spot on!!!!!!!!
The burning Bush has burnt up (not to mention $100+ million dollars) …to a crisp …and now blowin’ in the wind along with the tumble weeds that is the history of the other Bush’s disastrous presidency!
All this Bush bashing bothers me. George Herbert Walker Bush was the first President that I voted for, and I still think he was one of the better presidents in my lifetime. He led with a mixture of pragmatism and hope, appealing to the best in us.
Even his mistakes were commendable. The Somalia invasion was a fiasco, but we hadn’t tried nation building before, and the place was (and still is) a humanitarian disaster. He wanted to use the strength of the US to make the world a better place.
He was obviously a terrible father, though, given how his children turned out.
Actually, you usually can’t blame the parents for the outcomes of the kids. Too many counter examples on both sides.
Poppy was not a terrible president. He didn’t inspire anyone. He wasn’t particularly charismatic. He didn’t do anything new. He didn’t really do anything old. No one held Somalia against him because you’re right, it was a first.
He was not a terrible president. He was not a good president. He was a place holder.
You can blame great men for being to busy being great to be around to be fathers at all however. Not appplicable here.
“Poppy was not a terrible president.”
Iran-Contra.
Like I said, please don’t get me started on this family. Particularly the father.
People who were 3 months old (me!) when he was elected (and therefore not alive while he was in the deep state) would appreciate a long form of you “getting into it”.
The short answer is that there were several civil wars in Central America at the time. The Reagan administration supported the conservative side in all, unsurprisingly, and those conservatives were all quite evil, basically Fascists in the strict sense, committing assassination and mass murder to stay in power. The Reagan administration broke a number of US laws to provide military support for the fascist sides, notably including Iran-Contra, where they sold arms illegally to Iran to get money to try to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
Many Central American countries remain extremely dangerous to this day as a result of those wars, especially Honduras, long the murder capital of the world, and El Salvador, which may have taken that undesirable crown last year.
Bush the Elder has long been thought to be the man who actually orchestrated all this, even before it became clear than Reagan was mentally incompetent for much of his administration. He was head of the CIA before becoming Vice President, and the CIA was the agency doing most of the dirty work. This has never been proved, largely because Bush pardoned all the people who had been fingered before he left office. So he at the very least was an active conspirator with a lead role covering things up afterwards.
I mean I know all that. I just figured Booman meant something else.
I mean all of that and more.
I first voted against Nixon in 1972.
I always like Pappy Bush until he became Reagan’s VP. He was the possessor of the “best resume” in Washington. He had experience in a lot of areas.
However, in making himself acceptable to the right wing of the Republican Party, he sold all of his principals for votes. He went from the country club to the pigsty.
His signature was his love of “pork rinds”, fried pig skin. Disgusting.
Sadly…and this really is a sad point…it took someone even more unbearable to eliminate the least unbearable of a totally unbearable clan of monsters.
Pray that Trump has no children with political aspirations. Maybe he’ll be one-and-done.
AG
Great but sad tweet.
Watching JEB slink away is a good good thing and a good good feeling.
That said, let us not forget that the Clintons are BFFs with the Bush Crime Syndicate. HRC has been endorsed by Henry Kissinger.
My celebration is short-lived. In truth, I feel that we’ve just replaced JEB with HRC. Pile on, if you feel like it. I call it as I see it.
Very much liked your comment at NC in the “crackpot realism” thread. But you had a lot of competition as that may be one of the best threads evah!
Thanks. That was a good thread. Also a very useful blog. Yves & Lambert do a good job, and I’ve learned a lot from them, the articles and links. Very useful for good macro and micro economics/financial info, etc.
Good to see you back.
Haven’t been away — just taking time out to read more widely and think. Plus, so much of what people seem to want to talk about bores me or after saying X sux three times, repeating it another thousand times adds nothing.
Nevertheless, I worried. I’m becoming an Old Lady.
Well put, Boo. It’s a tragic commentary that Rubio, Cruz, Trump, Carson, Christie, Fiorina and Huckabee were able to make Bush’s monstrous policies seem “moderate” and “reasonable”.
Jenna and Not-Jenna could still raise up some future scions. Its like how Lorraine became Hapsburg Lorraine when they married Maria Theresa.
I get the impression that not-Jenna (assume that is a reference to her twin, Barbara) is actually quite a bit more liberal and is not really much of a Republican (if at all).
Interesting, any thing linkable or just a feeling?
For a Mormon, Ken Jennings if fuckin’ cold.
I laffed.
Bush’s loss is the loss of Citizens United. With CU, rich people can fund superpacs, and these can fund ads.
However, the ads for a bunch of candidates did not convince anyone. Bush spent a lot of money, raised a lot of money. His failure means that Citizens United is a spent force. The rich spend money on idiots, but you need votes, and the ads cannot buy everything. And more ads simply make for more noise. The fundamental issue of the Bush candidacy — DO YOU WANT ANOTHER BUSH FER GOD’S SAKE — could not be suppressed by more money.
ot:
Four Paths Obama Could Take With His Supreme Court Nominee
BY IAN MILLHISER
FEB 22, 2016 8:00 AM
By many accounts, President Obama hopes to name his choice to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia within two weeks, so there is precious little time to speculate about who that nominee may be. There’s also a dauntingly long list of potential nominees. Seven years in the White House, including more than a year when a Democratic Senate could confirm nominees without fear that they would be blocked by a filibuster, enabled Obama to elevate a number of potential justices to lower courts. Additionally, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) appears to have used his three appointments to his state’s highest court to build a farm team for Democratic presidents looking for a future Supreme Court nominee.
The person the president eventually picks will reveal a great deal about how he plans to confront Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) plan to block anyone Obama sends up. Below are four potential strategies the White House may deploy. This list is not meant to provide an exhaustive catalog of potential nominees. Many names that have been suggested in the media as possible nominees (Loretta Lynch, Pam Harris, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Pam Karlan, Paul Smith, etc.) are not discussed below.
ot:
Conservatives: Court nominee must be stopped at all costs
02/22/16 06:00 AM EST
Conservative leaders are sending a blunt message to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: The Supreme Court is more important than your majority.
McConnell’s (R-Ky.) top priority since becoming majority leader last year has been to put his colleagues in a strong position to win reelection, in part by showing that Republicans can govern.
But bottling up President Obama’s nominee to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia could bring the work of the chamber to a screeching halt, if Democrats choose to retaliate.
Conservatives say that’s the risk McConnell has to take.
Taking action on a Supreme Court nominee — even through the Judiciary Committee — when Obama has less than a year left in his term would be a cardinal sin, conservative activists say.
They argue the ideological balance of the court is so important that it’s not worth playing political games to take the pressure off vulnerable Republican incumbents.
“I would rank having a conservative justice as more important than having the majority in the Senate,” said David Bozell, president of For America, a conservative advocacy group. “God knows this Republican majority in the Senate hasn’t done much anyway for conservatism, period.
“If you look at some of the conservative movement’s successes, it’s in large part due to the court doing some decent things and making some good decisions,” he added.