OUTED: Jeb Bush!

email Stephen L. Goldstein: trendsman@aol.com

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            This column answers three questions: Will wonders never cease? Does hypocrisy know no limits? Can you fool all of the people all of the time?

            Extremist Jeb Bush is now parading as the self-proclaimed voice of moderation—and the press is letting him get away with it. During his recent appearance before a Congressional committee, the same man who as Florida governor swore he would never raise taxes had the chutzpah to say that, had he been president, he would have accepted the hypothetical deal that every ITAL tea party/GOP presidential candidate rejected when it was proposed to them during one of their debates: $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases.

            In addition, uncompromising Jeb now has the gall to posture himself as the leading GOP spokesperson for bipartisanship—and against take-it-or-leave-it, my-way-or-the-highway ideological rigidity. Meeting with reporters and editors recently in New York, he has been quoted, in garbled sentence structure, lamenting the loss of an alleged GOP spirit of “working across the aisle”: “Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground, similar to my dad, they would have had a hard time if you define the Republican Party—and I don’t—as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement.” He also said: “Back to my dad’s time or Ronald Reagan’s time, they got a lot of stuff done with a lot of bipartisan support that right now would be difficult to imagine happening.”

            Don’t ever be taken in by Jeb’s political equivalent of “Kumbaya.” The heir apparent to the tattered Bush Dynasty speaks with a forked tongue. As Florida governor, he was partisan, divisive, and autocratic. He set out to recreate the Sunshine State in his image—and let no one stand in his way. He relentlessly attacked government as the cause of our problems, was the sworn enemy of unions and public education. When he told Marco Rubio to jump, the former Florida House Speaker asked, “How high?” In 2010, he got tea-party favorite Rubio elected to the U.S. Senate, helping to radicalize it. Even now, behind-the-scenes, Jeb pushes an activist, fiercely ideological agenda in Florida: Constitutional Amendment 8, which would destroy our historic separation of church and state and allow unlimited tax dollars to flow to religious organizations—for any purpose. In other words, Jeb is still an example of the rabid partisanship he claims to be against.

            The obvious question is: Why is Jeb speaking out now? Why has he not been the voice of compromise and moderation during most of the Obama years—and especially after Sen. Mitch McConnell said his chief goal was to make Obama a one-term president? Obviously, because the strategy has boomeranged! Being anti-everything-Obama has made the tea party/GOP anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-a-lot-of-good things. Jeb now realizes he and his party opened a Pandora’s box of political mischief, created and indulged the tea-party Frankenstein that has taken over and is destroying them—and he’s lost any chance of becoming president.

            “All the world’s a stage”—and Jeb and the members of the tea party/GOP don’t know it, but they are acting out a Greek tragedy. Their rigid ideology, which they have all clung to as their strength, is now the source of their own undoing. They are losing long-time, moderate party members to extremists. It’s the fulfillment of 30 years of misplaced thinking: The Ronald Reagan whom Jeb called “moderate,” set in motion the radicalism that has destroyed the GOP. According to Grover Norquist, the Gipper asked him to start Americans for Tax Reform, as the head of which he bullied Republicans into signing the extremist no-tax pledge, which Jeb now derides.

            As in any Greek tragedy, the tea party/GOP is deaf to choruses that have tried, and continue to try, to save them from their clueless course of self-destruction. Of their own doing, they are twisting in the wind. Greek tragedies are not about “Forgive them for they know not what they do,” just the opposite: the Law of Karma, “what goes around comes around.” In Greek tragedy, characters are responsible for their own downfall, caught in a vice of their own making, unable to free themselves from themselves. They don’t slip on banana peels and crack their skulls. Fatal “character” flaws do them in.

            So, the answer to my initial three questions should be obvious: Wonders will never cease. Hypocrisy knows no limits. And you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, though people like Jeb Bush will never stop trying. They just can’t help themselves.#