Is this what Benjamin Franklin was referring to? When Mrs. Powel asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The two forms of governing are a monarchy and a republic. The former is hereditary. The other is not.
John Adams served fairly well as our second president. His son, John Quincy Adams, was our 5th president. John Quincy served his father and country in so many capacities that many historians consider him the most qualified of all presidential candidates. Further, he is touted as the most intelligent person to serve in that office. Until the Bush family contaminated our body politic, they were the only ones to flirt with the concept of monarchy. Flirt is not the proper word. Both were staunch believers in the republican form. Their service was not due to the seeking of power nor was it the progeny of ego. Now, we have devolved to the Bush and Clinton families.
We’ve heard the term entitlement thrown around quite a lot these past few years, almost as a profanity. The word was used to refer to such programs as Social Security and Medicare. In fact, people were entitled to receive benefits from these programs. We paid for them all of our working lives. If one must use that word as a slur, the proper way to do that is to say someone has “a sense of entitlement.” That use describes many people in this country: the Bush family and the Clinton family top that list.
Since 1980, either a Bush or a Clinton ran for president or was on the ticket as vice president, until the last election cycle. Oh, shit. It begins again. Jeb. Hillary. What, then Chelsea?
Prescott Bush was a banker, born into wealth, a member of the elite. He became a senator. He inculcated into his son, George Herbert Walker Bush, a sense of entitlement — the wrong kind. It appears hereditary now.
Enter, the latest Bush ego; John Ellis “Jeb” Bush. Little Jeb is trying to touch all of the bases in preparing for his run to follow Daddy and Big Bro. He desperately needed to create the impression that he knew something about the rest of the world, though he has yet to do that domestically. So, the family minions set him up to give a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The entire point was to sound “presidential.” Judge for yourself.
“We have to develop a strategy, that’s global, that takes them out,” Jeb said. “First, the strategy, you know, needs to be restrain them, tighten the noose, and then taking them out is the strategy.”
Stop laughing. At least he threw in the word global, in an amateurish stab at connecting with his audience. Truly, give me 2 hours with a high school sophomore and I could guarantee a more polished, more professional performance. Maybe 1 hour.
Iraq? Iran? Most people know the difference, though apparently not Jeb. However, Jeb’s brother seemed to confuse Iraq with Afghanistan. Also, Little bro seems to have trouble knowing how to pronounce the names of those who populate the rest of the world. He really should find an adviser that knows how to pronounce Boko Haram. Oddly, the meaning of those words, “Western education is forbidden,” give Jeb something in common with them. I doubt Jeb could tell us how tall Boko Haram is or his favorite pork dish.
Jeb seems to be on a tour to tell every media outlet in the hemisphere that he is not his father; he is not his brother. “I am my own man.” That may be why only 19 of his 21 foreign policy team served his father and his brother.
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump writes “the foreign policy team of any Republican president would probably draw heavily from the experience of the past three Republican administrations.” Jason Linkins in the Huffington Post is too kind, noting, “This is, sadly, the drawback of a political culture that’s insular in just about every way — it’s hard to simply excommunicate the incompetents. For the same reason, most Democratic administrations will inevitably be advised by the dim goobers that brought you the Commodity Futures Modernization Act.”
The grandiosely-named Project for the New American Century issued a Statement of Principles on 3 June 1997. Basically, it was the neocon creedo. They threw in the obligatory mention of St. Ronnie, politely forgetting his foreign policy disasters: Iran-Contra, Lebanon, Grenada, inserting US forces to protect reflagged Kuwaiti tankers in the midst of the Iran-Iraq War, attacking Libya with naval and air forces and a few others. The Pentagon counts 16 active military missions in 12 countries during the Reagan Regime.
Here are those signing that “Statement of Principles:” Elliott Abrams, Gary Bauer, William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky, Steve Forbes, Aaron Friedberg, Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney, Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby, Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen, Donald Rumsfeld, Vin Weber, George Weigel and Paul Wolfowitz. These are the people that told us the Iraqis would greet us as liberators and Iraqi oil would pay the entire cost of the war. Oh, well. Finding an iota of realistic appreciation of any foreign policy issue among this group would be of a greater order of difficulty than collecting a handful of Higg’s Bosons. Associating himself with those “experts” and those policies hardly separates Jeb from W. His own man, indeed.
While we are speaking of losers, why does Myth Romney come to mind? At least he realized, when looking for his own foreign policy staff, that, as Bump put it, he “branched out,” (went elsewhere) since “the Bush-era advisers on foreign policy were too damaged.” When you can’t match the insight and daring of old Myth, you should not advertise your ignorance so publicly.
Jeb’s breadth of ignorance goes even further. His claim that ISIS troops number 200,000 differs a little from last week’s estimate of 20,000 to 31,000 by National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen. Who do you believe?
Old Jeb came up with a new phrase, “Liberty diplomacy.” It seems he wants for those foreign “friends” of his something he doesn’t think we Americans should have. He supports the NSA’s spying on us and giving law enforcement open-ended authority to eliminate other unnecessary rights and freedoms.
Jeb has spent the bulk of his career trading off of the family name. One little service he provided recently came to my attention. While daddy was vice president, Jed lobbied the Secretary of HHS to give Miguel Recarey, Jr. a waiver so that his HMO would receive more Medicare funds. This involved hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. Jeb got a paltry $75,000 but claimed it was for a real estate deal that, oddly, never closed. He said he never lobbied the secretary. According to the HHS secretary and two other officials in Congressional testimony, he did. He lied. Miguel, who bragged of connections to the Cuban mafia, fled the country — with your money. You are known by the company you keep.
Nothing he has done happened because he was his own man. Jeb has spent a great deal of time amassing his personal wealth. Until recently, in preparation for his run for the family’s entitled desk in the Oval Office, Jeb was an adviser for Barclay’s, the British banking and financial firm. Google “Barclays fines” to discover how ethical his late employer is.
My years of education and experience in foreign affairs don’t convince me that drumming up billionaire and corporate clients for one of the major players in the recent global economic meltdown is a sufficient foundation for dealing with ISIS, the Ukraine, Boko Haram, China, North Korea or the myriad of other issues we face.
Jeb offers the electorate a familiar family name, a sense of entitlement, ambition, contempt for those not named Bush and little else.
This is not a partisan shot in favor of Hillary. While she has some experience (in misguided policies), she offers essentially the same virtues I ascribe to Jeb in the previous paragraph. Both personify American Exceptionalism in a purely negative sense. Where is an honest, competent leader when we are in such dire straights? Are we going to answer Ben Franklin that we can’t keep a republic?
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