When will Jeb Bush give up his candidacy?

There’s yet another Republican presidential debate scheduled for tonight, and as we sit patiently waiting for the candidates to take the stage, let’s revisit one of the critical moments from the last debate. Jeb Bush, in need of a strong performance and looking to take down Marco Rubio a few pegs, let rip with an attack on Rubio’s shoddy attendance record in the Senate. Rubio was ready for the attack, easily deflected it, and then turned it back on Jeb by making him look petty and desperate. It was a disaster for Jeb, and it happened because Bush and his political operation spent the days and weeks leading up to the debate making it painfully obvious that he would attack Rubio along these lines, giving Rubio all the time in the world to prepare and practice his response.

So now Jeb is coming into this debate in even worse shape and in even greater need of a strong performance and/or a Rubio flameout. Given the pantsing he received the last time around, you’d think Jebworld would have learned its lesson about telegraphing attacks. But, alas, Team Jeb just can’t keep its mouth shut. As the New York Times reports this morning, Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, is sinking $20 million into anti-Rubio attack ads, and it has plans to go after his record on, of all things, abortion:

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There’s yet another Republican presidential debate scheduled for tonight, and as we sit patiently waiting for the candidates to take the stage, let’s revisit one of the critical moments from the last debate. Jeb Bush, in need of a strong performance and looking to take down Marco Rubio a few pegs, let rip with an attack on Rubio’s shoddy attendance record in the Senate. Rubio was ready for the attack, easily deflected it, and then turned it back on Jeb by making him look petty and desperate. It was a disaster for Jeb, and it happened because Bush and his political operation spent the days and weeks leading up to the debate making it painfully obvious that he would attack Rubio along these lines, giving Rubio all the time in the world to prepare and practice his response.

So now Jeb is coming into this debate in even worse shape and in even greater need of a strong performance and/or a Rubio flameout. Given the pantsing he received the last time around, you’d think Jebworld would have learned its lesson about telegraphing attacks. But, alas, Team Jeb just can’t keep its mouth shut. As the New York Times reports this morning, Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, is sinking $20 million into anti-Rubio attack ads, and it has plans to go after his record on, of all things, abortion:

http://www.salon.com/2015/11/10/jeb_bush_is_committing_politcal_malpractice_his_super_pac_has_an_embarrassingly_bad_scheme_to_destroy_marco_rubio/

A timely reminder that what ever the problem is with the personality on stage we also have in JEB!16 a consistent record of being incompetent at politics.

It is like a fighter sticking out his jaw to an opponent.

At the end of the evening, Bush insisted that America doesn’t need “an agitator in chief or divider in chief” but rather a “commander in chief.” But when he got the chance Tuesday night to show how convincing he could be in that role, he wound up sounding less forceful than a rookie libertarian senator, a businesswoman with no real foreign policy experience, and his 44-year-old protégé from Florida, all in the span of a few short minutes.

Bush ended his closing statement with time to spare. He looked like a man who knew his moment had passed.

Anyone who votes for a Republican is a goddam idiot.

The reason we are losing jobs is because of the greed of the labor class rather than the wealthy owners and CEO's. America's workers want to earn more than people who work in Bangladesh and rural China...which is a sure job killer.

Judging primary campaign debates can be a tricky business, because those most effective on stage and before partisan base voters often aren’t the one who are most reasonable. Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate is a classic example. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich claimed moral victories. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, by contrast, were careless zealots. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, meanwhile, “won” the debate, in part because the moderators didn’t pin him down on politically tricky issues.

More than any other substantive issue, immigration has sorted the GOP candidates into those who would like to govern in reality and those who want to do something else. Trump repeated his call for mass deporting illegal immigrants — before allowing some to come back, presumably the good ones, who would re-enter through a classy door. Cruz amplified Trump’s comments with this fantastical statement: “If Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose.” On the contrary, if Republicans nominate an immigration hard-liner, they will lose.

John Kasich fought back:


For the 11 million people, come on, folks. We all know you can’t pick them up and ship them across, back across the border. It’s a silly argument. It is not an adult argument. It makes no sense.

Jeb Bush did, too:


Twelve million illegal immigrants, to send them back, 500,000 a month, is just not — not possible. And it’s not embracing American values. And it would tear communities apart. And it would send a signal that we’re not the kind of country that I know America is. And even having this conversation sends a powerful signal — they’re doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now when they hear this. That’s the problem with this. We have to win the presidency. And the way you win the presidency is to have practical plans. Lay them out there. What we need to do is allow people to earn legal status where they pay a fine, where they work, where they don’t commit crimes, where they learn English, and over an extended period of time, they earn legal status.

But when the moderators turned to Rubio, a candidate with a complicated history on the immigration issue who would no doubt like to play both sides, they lobbed him this softball: “With factories run by robots and shopping done increasingly on smartphones, many traditional jobs are just going away. How do you reassure American workers that their jobs are not being steadily replaced by machines?” That’s effectively asking Rubio to recite the “economy” portion of his stump speech. He took advantage of this and the other opportunities the moderators handed him to display his rhetorical gifts.

The situation was similar as the candidates discussed banking — of the central variety and otherwise. Cruz called for re-adopting the gold standard, a position that, economist Justin Wolfers pointed out on Twitter, “literally 0% of leading economists favor” in a recent poll. Rand Paul questioned whether “we want a Federal Reserve that’s involved so much in determining interest rates.” In the undercard debate, Chris Christie accused the Fed of manipulating interest rates to benefit President Obama’s poll numbers. Though they might resonate with some Republicans, these lines of argument, if acted upon, would be economically toxic.

Meanwhile, the most notable thing Bush and Kasich called for on banking regulation was increasing the amount of capital banks have to keep on hand to cover their operations. Though a debatable point, it’s well within the realm of reasonable economic discussion.

The moderators turned to Rubio and asked, “Why should the American people trust you to lead this country, even though [Hillary Clinton] has been so much closer to the office?” Another softball. Rubio swung: “This election is about the future, about what kind of country this nation is gonna be in the 21st century….” You get the picture.

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The reason we are losing jobs is because of the greed of the labor class rather than the wealthy owners and CEO's. America's workers want to earn more than people who work in Bangladesh and rural China...which is a sure job killer.

Your kidding me, right? Why do the republican voters buy into that self serving crap mouthed by republican leaders? A bunch of dupes, no offense.

Unfortunately we seem to have more goddam idiots than educated U S citizens.

RABEL222 wrote:

Unfortunately we seem to have more goddam idiots than educated U S citizens.

Alternatively this opinion of yours might be the proof that you are not aware enough to understand what is going on around you.

Jeb Bush said a peculiar thing last night:

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What we ought to do is raise the capital requirements so banks aren't too big to fail. Dodd-Frank has actually done the opposite, totally the opposite, where banks now have higher concentration of risk in assets and the capital requirements aren't high enough. If we were serious about it, we would raise the capital requirements and lessen the load on the community banks and other financial institutions.

The is peculiar for two reasons. First, it's unlikely that most viewers had the slightest idea what he was talking about. Second, he has things exactly backward. In fact, Dodd-Frank mandates higher and safer capital levels, and it does so largely because of a Republican amendment to the act.