Monday, April 27, 2015

Jeb Bush's Laughable Hypocrisy



Kansas City, KA - It was once, a long time ago when Twitter had not been invented and America had not yet been blessed by importing pizza to its shores that men (no women even ran in those days) who wanted to be President of the United States didn’t run for that office.

Things were different back then, with what was called “front porch campaigns,” where candidates, while, apparently, sitting on their front porches, let it be known among a few that they wanted to run for president, and those people went out and campaigned. It was seen as undignified, in the first few years of American Presidential Politics, to actually run a campaign yourself, because anyone who did that must be “greedy” for power. You just sat on their porch, and sat hard, kept your fingers crossed, and hoped your people could pull it off.
Of course that ended a long time ago, and now candidates are in a desperate run for the White House in which they often can’t afford more than a couple of days away from the campaign trail, where five to ten speeches a day can be a norm, where there is constant attempts to make the headlines and get interviews to remind Americans why they are such a great person and why you should vote for them, and everyone is in a mad dash-and-grab food fight.
So it would seem ridiculous if a candidate, especially one who many claim is a name from the past, such as Jeb Bush, were to try a strategy from the past, and give his campaign over to someone else, someone who legally, once he declares his actual candidacy, Jeb can exercise no control over.
But that seems to be exactly what former Governor of Florida; the sixty-two year old Jeb Bush seems to be planning. Announcing just recently that his Super PAC, (Political Action Committee) will be taking over many of the things traditionally done by campaigns, such as, like, actually campaign.
For a man who wants to be nominee for the Republican Party, and thus by proxy be Hillary-basher-in-chief, and keep up our party line about “how dare she have a financial scandal” although she didn’t technically break the law, Bush doing what he is doing is laughable indeed.
The Bush Brothers
Of course there is no question why Jeb is planning on handing over control of his campaign to his “Super PAC,” it is because of campaign finance laws. A  candidate’s campaign, as the law now stands, would not be able to collect more than 2,700 dollars from each individual donor. But a PAC can take unlimited amounts of contributions. So, it is a win-win for Bush, he can remain running-but-not-legally-running hide and go seek operation for as long as possible, thus allowing him to continue to organize “Right to Rise” and fundraise for it as he is already doing, and place a very trusted man at the helm as he has already done, and then when he feels that his “non-campaign” is ready for primetime, this group that he founded, that he fundraised for, and whose sole purpose is make Jeb Bush president of the United States, will supposedly have no contact whatever with him. Right.
Of course, nobody really believed in the early days of “dignified” politics, that those candidates were not running their campaigns, and it’s hard to believe Bush wouldn’t be running his. Impossible, in fact. Even the New York Times said this morning in an editorial the laws are nearly impossible to enforce. And of course, while Bush would not be sitting in the headquarters of the PAC, he would only need to give speeches, in which he could, perfectly legally say this is what he would do if he were in charge of it, and of course, you can bet the next morning that will happen.
Hillary Clinton has money scandals and scandals in just about everything else. She has as many holes in her armor as a sinking battleship, and for Jeb Bush, the man who wants to be the “good guys” nominee to start doing end runs around laws like he is a football carrier is not illegal, but smacks of a sort of elitism that we already know he possesses. The office of the presidency is the most sacred trust ever invented in Western Civilization, outside perhaps that of the pontiff, and the man who holds it must be above reproach in all. In this thing, Bush is not.
However, in all of Jeb’s convoluted handling of his “non-campaign,” in all of his gaffes, in all of his weak stances on issues, there is one glimmer of hope. He is in fourth place for the GOP nomination. The hope is that he stays there.
 
Andrew C. Abbott

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