Jeb Bush (R) said he isn’t interested in talking about Iraq war and his brother’s role in starting it, Bloomberg reports.
Said Bush: “I won’t talk about the past. I’ll talk about the future. If I’m in the process of considering the possibility of running, it’s not about re-litigating anything in the past. It’s about trying to create a set of ideas and principles that will help us move forward.”
“My dad is the greatest man alive. If anyone disagrees, we’ll go outside. Unless you’re 6’5″ and 250 pounds and much younger than me and then we’ll negotiate.”
— Jeb Bush, quoted by USA Today.
David Weigel: “On the right, the return of Mitt Romney—which I prefer to call the Romneyssiance—has sparked fresh new debates about why Jeb Bush was ever the great 2016 GOP hope. Why does he inspire such skepticism, from the right and the center-right, when his brother didn’t?”
Washington Post: “While Obama has certainly been battered over his six years, he can at least say this: He’s in considerably better shape than his predecessor, George W. Bush, heading into the home stretch.”
“While Obama’s and Bush’s numbers rivaled each other for the better part of the middle of their presidencies — complete with hard-fought reelection races — Obama in recent months has differentiated himself from the tail end of the Bush years, keeping his approval rating steadily above 40 percent.”
Mark Murray notes that Jeb Bush’s mission statement for his new PAC strikingly sounds a lot like his brother George W. Bush’s “Compassionate Conservative” platform during his 2000 presidential campaign.
“So if Jeb Bush’s outline is any guide, you could expect his domestic goals and platforms to look similar to his brother’s. Of course, this raises the question whether this is what today’s Republican Party and conservative movement want – a question that probably won’t be decided at least a year from now.”
Mother Jones notes the first person Jeb Bush followed on Twitter was none other than his brother’s former deputy chief of staff and political adviser, Karl Rove.
Washington Post: “So entrenched are these two families in presidential politics that Americans under the age of 38 have experienced only one national election — 2012 — in which there has been no Bush or Clinton running for president or vice president.”
“I’m going to end on a note of gratitude — something I never thought that I would say. George W. Bush, thank you for not dying while you were in office.”
— Jon Stewart, on former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense of torture during the Bush administration.
“The report’s full of crap, excuse me.”
— Former Vice President Dick Cheney, quoted by Politico, on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney said that President Bush was not kept in the dark on the CIA’s interrogation techniques, calling the Senate Intelligence Committee report’s claim a “flat out lie,” according to The Hill.
Said Cheney: “I think he knew certainly the techniques, we did discuss the techniques, there was no effort on our part to keep him from that. That the president wasn’t being told is just a flat out lie.”
“It served absolutely no purpose other than one last thumb in the eye of the Bush administration and was a big mistake in my opinion.”
— Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), quoted by TPM, on the Senate’s torture report.
“The CIA contractors who helped develop and operate the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ that the agency used on terror suspects, including waterboarding, were paid more than $80 million,” NBC News reports.
“The contract was for more than $180 million, but the contractors had only received $81 million when their contract was terminated in 2009.”
Former Vice President Cheney admitted to the New York Times that he had not read the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report but “from news reports about it, he said he had heard nothing to change his mind about the wisdom and effectiveness of the program.”
Said Cheney: “What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it. I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.”
Here’s a curious note in the Senate’s report on torture pertaining to President George W. Bush:
“The presentation also noted that the President of the United States had directed that he not be informed of the locations of the CIA detention facilities to ensure that he would not accidentally disclose the information.”
[speech_bubble type=”std” subtype=”a” icon=”pwdome.jpg” name=””]What else did he prefer not to know? [/speech_bubble]
A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that the CIA “routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public,” the New York Times reports.
The Washington Post notes the report “delivers new allegations of cruelty in a program whose severe tactics have been abundantly documented, revealing that agency medical personnel voiced alarm that waterboarding methods had deteriorated to ‘a series of near drownings’ and that agency employees subjected detainees to ‘rectal rehydration’ and other painful procedures that were never approved.”
The Daily Beast catalogs “the most gruesome” parts of the report and the Washington Post summarizes 20 key findings.
“A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency has not even been made public yet, but former President George W. Bush’s team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions,” the New York Times reports.
“The report is said to assert that the C.I.A. misled Mr. Bush and his White House about the nature, extent and results of brutal techniques like waterboarding, and some of his former administration officials privately suggested seizing on that to distance themselves from the controversial program, according to people involved in the discussion. But Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it.”
“A lady never talks… Maybe there was a little hanky-panky, maybe there was a kiss on the roof.”
— Jenna Bush Hager, in a Bravo interview, on whether she ever fooled around in the White House.
Dana Millbank: “In a cruel echo of history, Obama is morphing into the president whose foreign policy he campaigned to overturn. Obama on Monday morning sacked his Pentagon secretary, Chuck Hagel, after huge midterm election losses in the sixth year of his presidency — just as Bush did in sacking Donald Rumsfeld after midterm losses in the sixth year of his presidency.”
“As with Bush, the ouster comes as a war in the Middle East is going badly — then, the Iraq war, now, the bombing of the Islamic State terror group. Rumsfeld’s ouster led to the surge in Iraq, and Hagel’s departure comes amid signs of an expanded role for U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria. And, as under Bush, this guarantees that Obama will leave his successor an ongoing U.S. war in the Mideast — quite possibly the sort of ground war Obama vowed to undo.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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