Is JEB! 2016 a big dishonest fake out, or an already done deal?

The Curly, Moe, and Larry of American politics

The recent flurry of media and blogosphere activity over Prince George P.'s JEB! 2016 boosterism, and the Crown Prince's public repudiation of it begs the obvious question. Since Bushes are not known for actually shooting straight with their rhetoric, is the JEB! 2016 buzz just one big, coordinated feint designed to prematurely promote George P. for 2024, or the logical ground work for an actual 2016 run by the current Bush Crown Prince?  There can be no doubt that the Bush family is going to try to seize the White House at some time again in the future.  Whether with JEB! in 2016, or his "Hispanic" son in 2024, that self-serving, mendacious effort will come, and that dark cloud will hang over the United States' future until the sad day arrives.  For the sake of the nation, hopefully it will come, and can be rebuffed, sooner rather than later.

JEB! 2016: more than likely?

Prince George P., the 2024 Republican nominee (and for whom the GOP establishment will help purchase the Texas Land Commissionership next week) has now gone on record and said his father, the Crown Prince, will "more than likely" run for president in 2016.  This comes after recent media bait that Columba and Dowager Queen Babs are now "on board" with JEB! 2016.

It's not 100 percent, though, because it's generally true that when a Bush's lips are moving, they are lying (with personal gain in mind), and it's truly hard to know how trustworthy Prince George P.'s words are.  They could be part of what is a calculated fake out so that the Crown Prince can come back in two or three  months, after the midterms, and tell his donor base that someone of his "character" can't possible get elected in today's political climate (a climate which of course his family and their hacks like Atwater and Rove carefully created over a quarter century to serve Bush family interests) by advocating a "positive, inclusive, joyful" message.

But JEB! will probably run.  He and his father believe too much in the idea that he is destined to the office, and he has both the right and obligation (to himself and his family, not the country) to obtain it by any means necessary.  The Bushes represent a self-deluded egotistic debasement of both Nietzsche' will to power concept, and Ayn Rand's ideas about the heroic, creative man, and view themselves as both Platonic and Straussian perfect examples of a "philosopher king" dynasty.

JEB! 2016: The Great Triangulation begins

JEB! has started to position himself to run for president in 2016 by doing what any Bush would do, talking out of both sides of his mouth. JEB! told a group of fat cat donors in South Carolina (the most important early Republican primary state) that he doesn't like the "polarizing fights and constant negativity of the political news media." So he watches Fox News for a few minutes each day, then switches over to ESPN. Apparently he didn't mean this as a joke, but rather as a pathetic attempt to tell anyone not impressed by the kool-aid of neocon conspiracy theories and Randian plutocrat hagiography peddled by the news network his family's political supports run for his benefit that he only kind of watches, but not really.

Movement conservatives not yet on board the JEB! 2016 Express

Just as Karl's Rove's already tottering "kingmaker" reputation collapses over WMDGate, there is news out of New Hampshire that the Right is holding out on JEB!, at least for now.  New Hampshire State GOP Chairman David Gosselin recently sent a letter to many within the GOP offering a detailed argument against supporting Jeb Bush in the next presidential election cycle. Gosselin acknowledges that JEB! and his handlers will create the impression of grassroots support by making what he implies would be corrupt deals with certain right-of-center influence peddlers that would “give him the veneer of acceptability with this [the GOP conservative base] powerful but disorganized constituency.”

Gosselin goes on to suggest something very prescient in the wake of Rove's recent implosion: that Karl Rove’s handling of George W. Bush actually paved the way for the current administration.  It's striking it took him this long to figure that out.

Politico adds fuel to the fire of a potential grassroots rebellion over a money-forced JEB! nomination by noting that JEB! is on record saying he would support tax increases for deficit reduction [or maybe to fund another bank or insurance bailout, or a war with Iran?].

The deadly truth about Rand Paul and the "certification racket"

The Washington Post's neocon queen Jen Rubin is JEB! 2016's biggest media cheerleader outside of the Fox World bubble.  And she has tasked herself the job of lighting the fuse to blow up Rand Paul's 2016 presidential hopes with a firebomb she dropped in the Post about Dr. Rand Paul's "board certification racket."

There was unfortunately some smoke already smoldering in the kindling. The story, first revealed in 2010 by the Louisville Courier-Journal, involved a dispute Dr. Paul, an ophthalmologist, had years ago with the authentic medical board that certifies ophthalmologists. The board created a requirement that physicians certified after 1992 had to be re-certified every ten years, and grandfathered an exemption for those who were certified by 1992. Paul was initially certified by the real organization in 1995, and fell into the group the new ruling effected, and he felt it unfairly burdened him while unfairly exempting others. He let his certification lapse in 2005, rather than submit to the new requirements for re-certification, and responded by creating his own certification organization, with himself as president, and then certified himself and other ophthalmologists similarly affected who wished to follow his lead. And of course he continued to advertise himself as a board certified ophthalmologist (by the new organization he created).

While this is certainly shady, it also certainly does not rise the level of a Karl Rove neocon "noble lie" used to hide the "deadly truth" of why the Iraq War was really fought, and why now the neocons want to fight it again.

Rand Paul has no chance of being the 2016 Republican nominee, whether an authentically certified ophthalmologist or not, but he will not look any more or less shady than the likely company he will keep on the primary debate floor.

Karl Rove gets the curtain pulled back on his (and the W. Bush adminstration's) duplicity, stupidity, and criminality

If the Crown Prince makes a royal run starting next year, he now has to be seriously considering what type of public role he will have for the main Bush family retainer and political enforcer, Karl Rove, after revelations that Rove masterminded a bizarre plot to cover up evidence of WMD found in Iraq by the US military in 2004.  Both the New York Times and The Daily Beast have released extended reports on this recently, and the rationale advanced by Rove and his supporters for his monumental stupidity is both stunning and inexplicable, and has created a firestorm of negative reaction among right wing radio media and blogosphere, including Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Erick Erickson's Red State, etc., none of whom are not yet publicly on board with JEB! 2016.

These revelations may have put Rove in the position of being an "emperor with no clothes" when it come to his future king making abilities.   His reputation, already damaged by his less than stellar performance on Fox News on election night in 2012, now appears to be in tatters.

The basic story is this: in 2004 the US military discovered several caches of old nerve gas and some enriched uranium in Iraq.  Rove coordinated a strategy of non disclosure of this information to the public because he believed it would be politically (with emphasis on the politics not the policy) counterproductive to have a public debate on the nature of WMD found in Iraq, because the caches were old and degraded, and did not support the position advanced by the administration of an active and ongoing WMD program.  George W. Bush signed off on this plan.  Now we know just how stupid the younger Bush is.

The obvious political and policy choice would have been to release everything to the public about any WMD found in Iraq.  Shout it from the rafters.  Any WMD stores found, however degraded, would have validated, in the public's mind, the underlying argument for war: that the Iraqi regime was hiding WMD, and not cooperating with the UN in the abatement of such weaponry. Consider that Bush had only to convince a public that was gullible enough to (almost) elect him in the first place, and actually narrowly elect him for a second term.  Rove is now revealed as a fool, not just a criminal, and one with a brain no better than the man he was thinking for.

On top of that, we are now getting an absurd new paranoid spin on this by desperate Bush GOP propaganda mill, Fox News, and other neocons:  ISIS just might have gotten, or may yet, get their hands on some of these hidden weapons caches of now revealed WMD if we don't go back into Iraq in force with another invasion. If the public succumbs to this line of fear mongering, they deserve the damnation they are going to get.  What they should be doing is demanding a national debate on whether to indict and arrest Karl Rove, George W. Bush and other top W. administration officials, or turn them over to the Hague.  Why? Consider the implications of what is now being pandered by these people.

If WMD were found by US forces in Iraq while we occupied that country, why are we now in danger of such weapons falling into the hands of ISIS?  The whole point of invading Iraq (at least the point that was sold by Bush and Rove) was to occupy the entire country, discover such weapons caches by any means necessary, and prevent them from being used in the future either by Saddam Hussein's government or anyone else.  If we now are unsure if any such weapons are still out there in Iraqi territory, now occupied either by ISIS or the Iranian puppet Shiite government we set up after the invasion, then this represents a monumental failure by the US and the W. Bush administration, and renders the whole invasion pointless.

The dirty little secret here is this: Rove and Bush were never really interested in WMD at all, expect as a selling point for the war, which was about nothing more than creating a neocon "national greatness" exercise to mobilize public opinion in favor of their real goal: making money for certain US business interests, and crony capitalists with fat government contracts. Read Imperial Life in The Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone if you want to get the nasty low down on the dark and dirty level of corruption that motivated and drove the whole sordid operation. Actually finding a lot of leaking caches of old nerve gas, or enriched uranium was the last thing Rove wanted to have to deal with. The US invaded Iraq with a military force that was far too small to effectively occupy the entire country and conduct proper WMD abatement and search and destroy, and this was never the military's primary political (emphasis political) mission.

And now JEB! will have to be the neocon and Bush dynasty point man for starting it all over again from scratch, and maybe this time including Iran also.  Fat chance, unless the American voters have a national death wish.

Politico: Karl Rove Is Ruining the GOP

American Thinker: Karl Rove: Weapon of Mass Delusion

Michelle Nunn: Desperate Bush Royalist

Willie Who?

Michelle Nunn is not smart.

She is the daughter of legendary Blue Dog Democrat Sam Nunn, and is running as a Democrat for Senate in Georgia. She already has the public support of crazy old "Zig Zag" Zell Miller, former Blue Dog Democratic Georgia Senator and Governor who turned independent and endorsed W. in 2004, gave his renomination convention keynote speech, and then challenged girly man Chris Matthews to a duel. Now why would someone like this need or want to make a television commercial linking themselves to the likes of King George I HW Bush?  No one smart.

His majesty emeritus is all in the tank for her opponent, an empty suite corporate shill and "outsourcer" named David Perdue, a Bush Chamber of Commerce soulmate if ever their was one, and Poppy does not like Michelle Nunn, who once ran his Points of Light charity, referring to her tenure there in her political ads. This is the same man who shamelessly exploited Willie Horton for his own political gain a quarter century ago, saw nothing morally or ethically wrong with that, and now questions Michelle Nunn honestly revealing she once worked for him, and that he liked the job she did (at least according to Neil Bush).  Michelle Nunn was not smart in choosing to work for the Bushes, and she probably deserves to lose simply for that monumental lapse of judgment, but what is even worse is that she doesn't understand one old rabid Blue Dog (Miller) on the tube with her is worth at least two toxic Bushes on her hands.