If Jeb Bush Keeps Talking about His Brother, We'll Keep Listening

Jeb Bush must've heard us asking wingnuts to keep talking, because he just won't shut up. He pulled a Full Ginsburg Sunday promoting his book on immigration, changing positions so often that he looked like Alex in the fast motion sex scene from A Clockwork Orange. In the midst of all his steamy bullshit, he managed to squirt out another little gem of wingnut speak that deserves a pin spot from this booth:

"So my guess is that history will be kind to my brother, the further out you get from this and the more people compare his tenure to what's going on now."

Actually, he makes a good point, if he's talking about the 8th grade history books being used in Louisiana voucher schools, which  Steven Hsieh discovered have this little tie-died bit:

Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners. Rock music played an important part in the hippie movement and had great influence over the hippies. Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship.

Hippie punching never gets old with wingnuts. So, yeah, that history might be kind to W, but in the real world, we work with facts like this: despite inheriting the Little Bush Depression, with 750,000 jobs being lost PER MONTH when Obama took over, and despite massive layoffs in public sector workers never seen in any other recession, Obama has seen more jobs created during his first 4 years than Bush did in 8.

In the real world, we work with facts like this: "That leaves Bush with the dubious distinction of becoming the only president in recent history to preside over an income decline through two presidential terms." And this: "Under Bush, the number of people in poverty increased by over 8.2 million, or 26.1 per cent. Over two-thirds of that increase occurred before the economic collapse of 2008."

The most agonizing thing about the slow motion disaster that was the Bush years, however, has to be the Iraq war and his massive tax cuts to the rich. The facts non-wingnut historians will be noting about these boondoggles for centuries are horrifying:

By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019. 

Any serious history of the Bush administration would have to include this: somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million people died as a result of the Bush adventure in Mesopotamia.

Any historian that treats Jeb's brother kindly should go hunting with a drunk Dick Cheney when he's loaded for bear.