During the opening of the African-American History Museum, the current Democratic First Lady lovingly embraced the former Republican president, George Bush.
Category: George Bush
Ah, George Bush! Almost eight years out of the White House and you’re still acting – or maybe it’s not an act – dumb. I have not missed you one bit!
As the music played to memorialize the five police officers killed in Dallas, George Bush used the opportunity to smile and to sway back and forth, totally enjoying the rendition and yes, totally out of place.
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What does it say about Jeb! when his primary mode of fighting back is to bring out his mommy and brother to fight his battles in the Republican nomination? It says Jeb! is weak, definitely too weak to be Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military on the face of the earth.
George W. Bush will stump for his younger brother for the first time Monday night, attending a rally in North Charleston along with his wife, former first lady Laura Bush.
The rally comes after Jeb Bush’s most forceful debate performance of the campaign, when he pushed back on Donald Trump for attacking his brother’s national security record.
“I’m sick and tired of him going after my family,” Jeb Bush said Saturday night. “My dad is the greatest man alive, in my mind. While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe and I’m proud of what he did.”
It was clear that the audience was on Bush’s side, as it loudly booed Trump and cheered for Bush.
But Trump wasn’t letting go of his line of attack Monday morning, vowing to come after both brothers if necessary.
“Now that George Bush is campaigning for Jeb(!), is he fair game for questions about World Trade Center, Iraq War and eco collapse? Careful!” Trump tweeted.
Bush hasn’t always embraced his family legacy. Last summer, he seemed unprepared to answer the question of how he would have handled Iraq, painfully torn between needing to acknowledge the mistakes from the war and wanting to avoid criticism of his own brother.
Way before George Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan and decided to invade Iraq in what eventually drained this nation of thousands of troop lives and over a trillion dollars, Senator Bernie Sanders warned of the dangers of invading Iraq.
Too bad Bush didn’t listen.
A couple of days ago, I outlined my theory of why Donald Trump is attacking George Bush. My theory then was simple – this attack on the Republicans supreme leader is actually an exit strategy for Donald Trump. Trump believes that by attacking Bush, the Republican base would stop supporting his bid for the Republican nomination, his poll numbers will fall as a result and like he said earlier this month,”If I fell behind badly, I would certainly get out.” This attack on Bush Trump’s way to get out!
I’m starting to second guess that theory. I’m now thinking that Donald Trump is just bipolar!
Trump is keeping up his attacks on the man who presided over the worst terrorist attack in America, despite Jeb’s feeble claim that George “kept us safe.” In yet another interview, Donald Trump stated three reasons why Bush should be blamed.
No. 1: Bush’s immigration policy. “We had very weak immigration laws,” Trump said, adding that perhaps if Bush had a Trump-style immigration policy, replete with “the strong laws that I’m wanting, these terrorists wouldn’t have been in the country.”
No. 2: People knew that the FBI, the National Security Council, and the CIA weren’t sharing information about potential threats. “They were not talking to each other,” Trump said. “If I’m president, I want to have my three most important agencies talking to each other and coordinating with each other.”
And No. 3: George Tenet, Bush’s director of central intelligence, “knew in advance that there would be an attack, and he said that.”
“I don’t blame anybody,” Trump continued, after listing those points. “But it’s possible,” he continued, that had the administration had stronger policy on those points, “perhaps something could have been done that was obviously better than the worst attack ever perpetrated on the United States.”
Trump, the real estate mogul, and former Florida governor Jeb Bush have hurled vitriol at each other since Friday, after Trump pointed out during a Bloomberg News interview that “the World Trade Center came down during [former president Bush’s] reign.”
Don’t really know how George did it, but for the second time in one month, Jeb Bush is claiming that his brother George, “kept us safe.”
He first made the outlandish claim in the second Republican debate on September 16th. At that time, Donald Trump had rightfully criticized George Bush for invading Iraq in a war that would lead to hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and trillions of dollars spent. Jeb pointed out to Trump and the rest of the world, that his brother “kept us safe!”
Okay…
And mow today. In an interview with Bloomberg, Donald Trump went a step further and blamed George Bush for the September 11th attacks.
“He was President,” Trump said. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
And again, Jeb chimed in saying his brother “kept us safe!”
Jeb should explain to the thousand of families that lost loved ones on September 11th how his brother “kept us safe!”
In an interview with Bloomberg on Friday, Donald Trump, the current leader in the Republican race for president, put the blame for the September 11th attacks directly on the shoulders of then President, George W Bush.
“He was President,” Trump said. “Blame him, or don’t blame him, but he was President. The World Trade Center came down during his reign.”
Breaking News: Donald Trump spoke the truth when he made that statement. And it leaves me to wonder why the current leader of the Republican Party will throw George Bush under the bus. We all know that a vast majority of Republicans believe that George Bush was not even the President when the world trade Center came tumbling down – an attack on this country that killed almost 3,000 Americans. What will cause Donald Trump to speak the truth about George W Bush’s failure to protect this country?
My take:
I think Donald Trump is really trying to get himself out of this presidential race he’s in. In the beginning, this was all a joke for Trump but Republicans started believing his nonsense and his poll numbers shot up. His intentions, I think, were never to lead in the polls the way he has. But the Republican voters love this man and he cannot figure out a way to shake them off and get out of this race.
So Donald Trump is doing all he can to get Republicans to hate him. He spoke bad about John McCain, he spoke bad about women, he spoke profanity at a campaign event and speaking about campaign events, his campaign events has nothing to do with policies, but about his poll numbers. And just when all the pundits say his last statement did him in and wrote him off, more and more Republicans jumped on the trump-wagon.
What other way can Donald Trump get out of this presidential race? Well, by throwing the anointed one of the Republican party under the bus of course.
By coming down this hard on George Bush, Donald Trump is sure to lose some in the Republican who think George Bush – their Supreme Leader – did nothing wrong and protected this country in his eight years in office. And maybe then with the Republican base is against him, Donald Trump can finally withdraw from the race and concentrate on selling his hats and books.
Call it pure Insanity or just American stupidity. The man whose policies erased a surplus and dragged this country into the second great depression while losing 700,000 jobs a month, is seen more favorably than the man whose policies added over 11 million jobs to the economy so far, brought the unemployment rate to the lowest it’s been in years and brought health care to millions of Americans… just to name a few.
I’ll call this the true definition of pure, unadulterated American stupidity.
A new CNN/ORC poll reveals that 52 percent of Americans see Mr. Bush positively, while 43 percent do not. In contrast, 49 percent view Mr. Obama favorably, while 49 percent do not. That makes Obama the least-popular president among all his predecessors today.
“The second term doldrums do exist, but time does seem to heal all,” Douglas Astolfi, a professor of history at Saint Leo University, summed up CNN’s findings.
Presidents and the economy: Who was best, worst? Take our quiz.
Obama’s numbers are down as dramatically as Bush’s are up. In January 2009, shortly after Bush left and Obama entered office, only 35 percent of Americans viewed Bush favorably, while Obama enjoyed stratospheric approval ratings of 78 percent
The Bush family cannot do anything wrong, no matter what the rest of the country thinks, no matter what the rest if the world thinks. And that sentiment was demonstrated in a recent interview when Jeb Bush said his brother George was absolutely right to invade Iraq, and that he, Jeb, would have done the very same thing too, even “knowing what we know now.”
In an interview on Fox, Jeb – a potential candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 – acknowledged that even “knowing what we know now,” he would invade Iraq just as his brother did back in 2004.
“I would,” Jeb said. “And so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody.”
But as I mentioned above, the vast majority of Americans and the world disagree with the Bush family on this one, even some in the higher echelons of the Republican party. Laura Ingraham – another candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2016 – concluded that Jeb Bush must be insane.
“You can’t still think that going into Iraq, now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do,” Ingraham said on her radio show. “If you do, there has to be something wrong with you.”
But it should come as no surprise that “knowing what we know now,” Jeb would still invade. In another bombshell recording, Jeb told a group of donors that his brother George, the same former president who authored the failed foreign policy of the Iraq war, was one of his top foreign policy advisers.
This is not a joke people. These Bush (es) just don’t get it. Although everybody see the fault in starting a war based on lies, Jeb is prepared to walk in his brother’s footsteps again even given what we know now.
Maybe Laura Ingraham is right. Maybe there is something insane about that family.
Here we go again. Another unwanted and unnecessary trip down Bush lane. Do we really want George Bush advising anyone on foreign policies? What is he advising Jeb on, telling him what not to do?
Bush cited his brother, former President George W. Bush, as one of his main advisers on the Middle East in a private meeting in Manhattan on Tuesday, according to three people who attended the off-the-record event.
The comment came as a shock to some who were in the room because Jeb, a likely presidential contender, has taken pains to publicly distance himself from his brother and his controversial policies, particularly in that area of the world.
In a national security speech in February, Bush said, “I am my own man,” and he has insisted he would develop his own policies on foreign affairs if he decides to run for president.
Hmmmm…. I wonder how many more decided to skip the 50th commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” because the Bush was there… I would imagine quite a few!
“I refused to march because George Bush marched,” Diane Nash, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told “NewsOne Now” host Roland Martin. “I think the Selma movement was about nonviolence and peace and democracy, and George Bush stands for just the opposite – for violence and war and stolen elections.”
Nash said that Bush’s legacy was at odds with that of the Selma movement, saying that the commemoration “should have been a celebration of nonviolence.”
The former President’s attendance was “an insult to me and people who really do believe in nonviolence,” she added.
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Remember the education president? That would be George H.W. Bush, who promised that he would focus on improving schools so that the United States would be number one in educating its children for the new millennium. His Goals 2000: Educate America Act had terrific political nuggets such as:
All children in America will start school ready to learn.
The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.
United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.
Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.
Of course, these goals were not met because they aren’t realistic. Public institutions that suffer from inadequate funding and political interference can’t guarantee that all students or every adult will do anything except be disappointed that as a nation, we couldn’t do better.
The along came his son, George W. Bush, who promised that the No Child Left Behind Act would do for America what its smaller implementation had done to Texas in the 1990s. This meant that all students would pass state tests by 2014 and schools that didn’t perform, either overall or because any subset of racial, ethnic or gender categories did not score well enough on said tests, would be closed. Bush even made Houston Superintendent of Schools Rod Paige the Secretary of Education.
That’s when the real story of how the Texas Education Miracle became one more Bush myth. It turns out that Paige and Bush cooked the graduation rate books, inflating the number of students who met school standards and essentially erased the records of students who dropped out or had discipline problems.
The NCLB was based on faulty numbers, but that didn’t stop it from infecting every aspect of school reform for the next decade. Testing became rampant and disruptive. Private testing companies like Pearson Education got very wealthy creating tests and changing the curriculum. President Obama’s embrace of this model was disturbing, and has led us to where we are today, wasting huge chunks of time modifying what students need to know and testing them not once (March), but twice (late April or early May).
Now word comes that the third Bush who wants to be president, former Florida Governor Jeb, promoted a charter school in Miami that is now closed, but he’s running as if the school is a shining successful example of his education agenda. The basic problem seemed to be that as a private citizen, Bush was able to raise money and be the face of the school, but as governor, he could not have his name on the school’s letterhead nor could he raise funds privately. Other issues also intervened, namely that Bush had to balance the state budget and unfortunately there wasn’t enough to pay for public schools and charters. Simply, the toy lost its luster.
But at least he has a policy that applies to the classroom. Compare that to Governor Chris Christie’s approach to education. He’s focused solely on economics and making sure that teachers, and indeed all public unions, pay more and more for their benefits while he skirts his own law and refuses to make full payments to the pension system.
In fact, you would think that Christie and the New Jersey Education Association made a major agreement on teacher benefits, according to a speech Christie made in Florida last week. There is no agreement, and there won’t be one on his terms. But I guess that when you’re running for president, you can say anything you want, and in the end, most people won’t know or care to know the difference.
That’s what happened with the two previous Bushes. Let’s make sure it doesn’t happen again.
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