Tea Partiers Are Right:
Jeb Is a RINO
Apparently, the American
political establishment isn't just afraid of
new ideas, it's afraid of new people
By Matt Taibbi
December 22, 2014 "ICH"
- "Rolling
Stone" - So Jeb
Bush might be running for president. The
rest of the world must be howling with
laughter.
Apparently, the American political
establishment isn't just afraid of new
ideas, it's afraid of new people.
It wants things so much the same, it's
seeking blood guarantees, like the old Euro
aristocracies that sealed military alliances
with marriages. It's pathetic, and if
Bush-Clinton turns out to be the general
election menu, it's going to make kleptocratic paradises
like the Soviet Union or the PRC look like
vibrant democracies in comparison.
And man, could anything be
less exciting, less of an inspiration to get
the vote out than that lineup? "Vote 2016!
Nothing Ever Changes!" People will stay home
and hand-remove their own moles before
dragging themselves to vote in that contest.
But hoping for anything
else increasingly looks like a vain pursuit,
now that Jeb has just "announced" that he
will "actively
explore" a run for the Presidency,
whatever that combination of terms means.
The news kicked off a
heated debate in the blogosphere over what
Bush's run will mean for conservatives, who
will have spent eight painful years waiting
to unseat the black Satan and probably had
not planned on settling for anything short
of a violent repudiation of his
administration. Unsurprisingly, the reaction
from the base to Jeb's announcement ranged
from mild nausea to outright hysteria.
Probably the funniest bit
was on Breitbart.com, where preeminent
military-thriller author Brad Thor took time
out from
talking about himself in the third person
and fictionally thwarting elaborate
presidential-kidnap plots to denounce Jeb's
entrance in the race. "If Jeb Bush is the
nominee, I will never vote Republican
again," he promised, via Twitter.
The Breitbart writeup
explained:
Putting a Democrat
or establishment Republican in the White
House in 2016 won't be sufficient, Thor
said.
"You put in a left
winger, it's going to increase the size of
the federal government. You put in a squishy
moderate, it's only going to increase the
size of the federal government more slowly."
Laugh all you want at Brad
Thor (and laugh you might: his books, which
contain lines like "Cradling an H&K MP7
submachine gun in the backseat beneath her
burka was twenty-five-year-old Sloane Ashby,"
were almost certainly an unironic
inspiration for Team America: World
Police). But he's not wrong. Jeb Bush
is not what the conservative base wants, not
by any stretch of the imagination.
Conservative voters of the
type author describes don't "sort of"
believe in balancing the budget. They
believe that it's a mandatory, day-one
prerequisite to other action. They likewise
insist that deficit spending of any kind has
to be immediately
discontinued, and they believe this to
be non-negotiable.
They won't accept any
restrictions on gun ownership, and their
stance on immigration is unequivocal (as one
Tea Party group
put it, "Illegal aliens are here
illegally"). Moreover their concept of
"limited government" isn't some abstract,
rhetorical pose. It's a concrete idea that
entails immediately wiping out massive
portions of the federal bureaucracy.
Someone like Jeb Bush, who
called immigration an "act
of love" and
supported Common Core (which was
supported by the demonic Obama and which
conservatives believe is a heretical federal
takeover of education), does not come close
to representing their values.
Jeb Bush isn't just a
Beltway insider. He's literally the
biological spawn of the political
establishment. He's not going to come to
Washington and (as the base wants and
demands) start hurling government
bureaucracies out the window in an attempt
to clean out the Augean stables of
big-government corruption.
Yet we all know that
someone like Bush or like Mitt Romney is
eventually going to be forced down the
throats of Republican voters by the
big-money donors of the Beltway. Jeb may not
be a hit
with Rush or Thor or "the base," but
he's a hit with the money folks, and
everyone, Republican voters especially, ,
know it.
In the coming days and
weeks we'll be hearing a lot of voices from
the Democrat-leaning side subtly (and in
some cases not-so-subtly) applauding this
process of subverting the desires of
conservative voters with sheer financial
force. Generally this will come in the form
of trying to convince Republicans that Jeb,
while maybe not all they want ideologically,
is a good horse for the horse race.
While not exactly
endorsing Bush, the general thrust of the
rhetoric from mainstream campaign watchers
will be that Jeb has a good shot at winning
and will make things tough for other
entrants.
The National Journal's
Ronald Brownstein set the example,
writing a scare piece ("Jeb
Bush's 2016 Move Fuels Democratic Debate")
arguing that Democrats should be knocking
their spindly little knees in terror before
such an imposing figure.
The entrance of Bush,
Brownstein loathsomely argues, should make
Democrats wonder if passing health care
reform was such a good idea, when they could
have passed something more "middle-class"
(read: white-voter) friendly.
After all, now that the
Republicans might be running a guy who
speaks Spanish, is married to a Mexican
woman, and supported Common Core, it's no
longer a guarantee that the Dems will sweep
the minority vote like they have the last
two election cycles.
Bush, Brownstein argues,
could be a game-changer just in terms of
perception of the parties' relative
strengths: while all everyone is talking
about now is why Republicans do so badly
with minorities, a loss of the White House
by a Hillary to a Jeb could flip the script:
It wouldn't take
much Republican improvement among minorities
in 2016 to shift the discussion toward why
Democrats are struggling so badly with
whites…
I wasn't a fan of the
Affordable Care Act, but the notion that
Democrats should have shelved a
revolutionary health care program in favor
of some kind of superficial handout to the
white middle class because Jeb Bush
speaks Spanish – well, that tells you
everything you need to know about how people
inside the Beltway think.
I disagree, obviously,
with the politics of the Brad Thors of this
world. And I'm with Bill Maher on this one –
I'd rather see Jeb Bush be president than,
say, Marco Rubio, because I personally
prefer that the president be someone who "eats
with a fork and a knife."
But voters, not some
miniscule bund of financiers and pundits,
should decide elections. One can argue that
the Tea Party Platform is not a grassroots
movement, that it just represents the wants
and needs of a different set of Daddy
Warbuckses like the Koch Brothers, who've
used clever marketing techniques to get the
frustrated, dying white middle class to
support slashing corporate taxes and
deregulating the economy.
But in the conservative
platform there are echoes of the real anger
and frustration of real people. Check out
entry #2 in this
Tea Party Platform: "Pro-domestic
employment is indispensable." The Jebs and
Hillaries who will head to the general
election fattened by money from the same
Wall Street banks that financed the
relocation of the American manufacturing
base from the Rust Belt to places like China
and India, they're not going to be worried
about "domestic employment" in the way the
Tea Partiers mean.
Voters, even crazy voters,
make better choices for the country than
behind-the-scenes oligarchs who scheme to
keep the field narrowed to an endless parade
of the The Same Old Crap. It's hard to see,
because the Schadenfreude factor is so high
when the losers are voters who think Barack
Obama is a Kenyan-born sleeper agent of
Black September, but when the choices aren't
real choices, everyone loses.
© 2014 Rolling Stone