Bush family values

With Jeb Bush running for the Presidency, this is worth remembering: "Bush-style conservatism isn’t only about upholding the plutocracy. It’s about money as a lubricator of “free enterprise” in the varied forms Bushes themselves have pursued through the generations: banking, oil, real estate, baseball team owning." (Sam Tanenhaus, The Bush Restoration 02/23/2015 The National Interest Mar-Apr 2015 issue)

Cenk Uygur looks at Jeb's current campaign in Jeb Bush Rejects His Brother By Doing More Of The Same The Young Turks 02/22/2015:

And if you have trouble remembering what government under the last Bush Presidency, aka, the Cheney-Bush Administration, was like, Tanenhaus has this reminder: "George W. Bush slipped through to a second term, but he needed help from Supreme Court conservatives to get there in 2000; Gore received roughly 540,000 votes more than he did. And he returned to private life trailing more bad feeling than any departing president since Richard Nixon." (my italics)

Shrub Bush's famous moderation and "compassionate conservatism" were on prominent display in the invasion of Iraq:

The trouble was “a series of faulty assumptions” that Bush’s war cabinet aggressively promulgated. One was that regime change in Iraq would bring stability to the region; another, that Iraq had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks. Bush administration hawks ignored all warnings that the Iraq invasion would inflame an already-volatile region, summoning forth fresh waves of jihadists. The martial dogma they embraced struck many as new. In fact, it was an offshoot of the rollback or “liberationist” doctrine espoused by militant anti-Communists in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time, this approach was rejected as irresponsible by Democratic and Republican presidents alike. But it flourished on the right. Its first major political spokesman was Barry Goldwater. “In addition to keeping the free world free, we must try to make the Communist world free,” he declared in The Conscience of a Conservative. “To these ends, we must always try to engage the enemy at times and places, and with weapons, of our own choosing.” This crusading foreign policy was later taken up by neoconservatives in Bush 43’s administration and at outposts like the Defense Policy Board and the Weekly Standard. Together, they created the Bush Doctrine, which was Goldwaterism revived. [my emphasis in bold]

Tannenhaus quote from Shrub's biography of his father: "When I was considering options for my vice presidential nominee, I called to ask [Bush Sr.’s] advice about his former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Without hesitating, he said, 'Dick would be a great choice. He would give you candid and solid advice. And you’d never have to worry about him going behind your back.'”

Old Man Bush is supposed to be moderate, too. Like Shrub. And Jeb.

Old Man Bush's moderation was on view early on: "In his first campaign, for the Senate in 1964, Bush denounced the Civil Rights Act, just as Barry Goldwater did. Bush lost—to the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough, who had supported the legislation—but he was now an early favorite of National Review." Or, as Charlie Pierce likes to call it, the long-time white supremacist journal National Review.

But he gets Bipartisan admiration: "Today the elder Bush’s presidency has profited from revisionism. (Barack Obama is an admirer.)"

Tannenhaus does point out that Old Man Bush did handle the collapse of the Soviet empire with less cinematic cowboy belligerence than St. Reagan's fans like to imagine Ronnie did: "Bush’s confident stewardship contrasts strikingly with the crusading of his son and discredits the claim that the two presidencies [Bush 41 and Shrub's] were ideologically of a piece."

And if Jeb manages to get the nomination, he is likely to try the same compassionate-conservative trick that both Old Man Bush and Shrub used: "if the economy continues to improve, Obama could leave office as a relatively popular president, as Clinton did in 2000, despite having been impeached. George W. Bush, grasping this, 'cunningly presented himself as Bill Clinton’s heir,' as David Frum wrote in 2008. Jeb is better positioned than most other Republicans to do the same in 2016."

And we need to remember the Bush family's elevated concept of public service: "for the Bushes, loyalty comes first. And like all dynastic families, they equate what is best for themselves with what is best for the country. This is the meaning of 'public service.'"

If you want a major dose of Jeb's foreign policy rhetoric, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs presents a video of his recent major foreign policy address, Jeb Bush addresses The Chicago Council on Global Affairs YouTube date 02/18/2015:

Charlie Pierce succinctly describes the Bush family's political legacy

"The Bush family carries with it through history the kind of collateral damage usually associated with a plague." - Charlie Pierce, What Are The Gobshites Saying These Days? Esquire Politics Blog 03/11/2013

Tags: jeb bush

Now here's a grim thought for a Saturday evening. Or anytime ...

From Russ Baker, The Jeb Scenario: Can You Say "President Bush" Again? Alternet 03/01/2012:

Before anyone races to declare that Americans will not stand for another Bush presidential campaign—and certainly not for another Bush presidency—let me just say that they’d be sorely underestimating the Bush family.

The Bushes are nothing if not resilient. George W. Bush, he of so few qualifications but with his own distinctive Bush personality and formidable charisma, came out of the dust of his father's re-election defeat in 1992, stronger than his father ever was politically. And though W. is now persona non grata to many, his brother would come back as a significantly different brand. He’s widely regarded as more capable, much more focused, much better at delivering points. He’s able to pull off a kind of sober, reasonable persona, more stable than a Santorum or a Gingrich or most of the other contenders. Rich but not entitled. A kind of Romney—without the Romney.

Nooooo-oooooooo.....!!!!

A more competent Bush with the same bad ideas? No, no, nooooo-oooooooo.....!!!!

As Baker puts it, "the Bush clan is the ultimate representative of the game plan of the one percent of the one percent."

And Jeb ain't no maverick among the Bushies:

There’s a whole bunch of stuff concerning Jeb that any budding investigative reporter should find good teething material. In 1980, after his father’s election as vice president, Jeb set up the Bush family franchise in the Sunshine State, with its increasing national political importance. He promptly got involved with the wealthy Cuban exile community that had long and deep covert connections to his father, and that wanted continued access for favors. One of those Cubans, Armando Codina, a self-made millionaire, took the veep’s son under his wing, and Jeb was soon on his way to his own fortune in real estate deals that often did not pass the smell test. This was, helpfully, under the shingle of "Bush Realty" in case anyone did not already know his father was in the White House and that Jeb was "open for business."

These guys don't "beat around the Bush." They don't have to. As Jeb told the Miami News in 1983, “I want to be very wealthy–and I'll be glad to tell you when I've accomplished that goal.”

Jeb would be more than happy to put his brother's Predator State model back into action.

Tags: jeb bush

Jeb's Esquire interview

The text of the interview that our next Republican President former Florida government and current leading hope of the Bush dynasty, Jeb Bush, did for Esquire is now online: Jeb Bush: The Future of the Republican Party 07/08/09. The interviewer is conservative pundit Tucker Carlson.

Our next Republican President Jeb is pretty explicitly saying that he's trying to promote what another Bush dynasty member might have called a "compassionate conservative" marketing strategy for the same Predator State strategy his brother and Dick Cheney practiced for eight years. He basically says he's glad the OxyContin radio screamers are doing what they are doing, but he wants Republican elected officials to project a more restrained and dignified image in public places.

He's about as explicit as it gets in saying that the Republicans' electoral troubles are not in substance or policy but are rather a matter of packaging, messaging, marketing:

Conservatives can win, can draw people toward our cause with the proper language and the proper ideas. I don't think that conservatism has been rejected in the United States. I don't believe it. ...

I don't think all is lost. The country is a center-right country. The problem has been that conservatives in positions of responsibility, particularly in the Congress, lost their way. And in general conservatism has gotten a little nostalgic and less focused on the here and now, and on the future. I'm a huge Ronald Reagan fan. The Republican primary was almost all about Ronald Reagan: Who was the heir to Ronald Reagan? Well, I mean, Ronald Reagan would be talking about ideas, would be talking about broad principles, would be talking about issues, more than what we heard in the primaries. The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different. ...

I don't think there's any seismic shift. The Democrats have won on tactics. ... In fact, [Obama] basically won the tax debate, which is breathtaking if you think about it. Cutting taxes is generally considered a center-right idea, not a center-left or left idea. He made it appear like McCain was going to raise taxes, which was unfair, but there was no response back. When there was an ideological component, it was generally centrist or even center-right. Had he said what he was going to do as a candidate, [Obama] would have lost. [my emphasis]

That's the "compassionate conservative" posture that they famously compassionate George W. Bush used in his Presidential candidacy in 1999-2000. Say things like, "The world is radically different than it was in the 1980s, dramatically different," that your press admirers can pick up on to say, now here's a man with fresh ideas and a new vision. But for policy, stick to the same old boilerplate slogans like in this interview: "What's the alternative? The alternative is to take time-tested practices and convert them to the world we live in. Which means you're going to cut taxes and cut spending."

Got that? Our next Republican President Jeb understands that the world has changed radically in the three decades since Reagan successfully ran for President on a program of cutting taxes and cutting spending. And so we need a radically new message for these very changed circumstances: "cut taxes and cut spending."

Our next Republican President Jeb is also a climate change denier, like virtually all of his Party:

Barack Obama would not have gotten elected if he'd let us in on his secret plan prior to the election. He would not have gotten elected if he'd said, "... My idea is to create a massive cap-and-trade system [based on the idea] that CO2 is [a] pollutant and we need to tax it in a massive way to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions." ...

[Q:]Do you believe global warming is primarily man-made?

I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further... It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we've actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. I think we need to be very cautious before we dramatically alter who we are as a nation because of it. [my emphasis in italics]

Media Matters has been addressing this particular talking point of the climate change deniers highlighted in bold, e.g., Media promote claims of global cooling despite overwhelming consensus to the contrary 03/30/09.

The global-warming-denial scam uses a similar approach to the industry-friendly Tobacco Institute, which presents research findings on the health effects of tobacco whose only purpose is to create an impression that the scientific/medical consensus on the matter is somehow "in dispute". Creationists use a similar method in opposing the entire concept of evolution, the existence of which is not in scientific dispute. But by raising pseudoscientific objections to it, the creationists try to leave the impression that a scientific controversy is there which doesn't exist. And this creation of phony controversies is accompanied by a denigration of science, framed as opposition to "dogmatic" science that defends elitist notions like evolution in some kind of more-or-less conspiratorial attempt to bamboozle the regular folks.

Our next Republican President Jeb plays directly to that brand of Republican Know-Nothingism in his comment, "I'm a skeptic. I'm not a scientist." The contrast between "scientist" and "skeptic" is a classic example of conservative up-is-down thinking. And also of the Christian fundamentalist outlook, which has always been obsessed with pitching their arguments against science in pseudoscientific terms and claiming that it's science and scientists who are the dogmatists taking things on blind faith, not their own form of the Christian faith and its practitioners .

This kind of pitch has a lot of appeal for the Republican base. And it's the kind of thing that our sad excuse for a national press can be persuaded represents plain-spokenness and a downhome touch. Time recently ran an article about Sarah Palin that shows how easily our press can turn their currently-prevailing Palin-is-a-dummy narrative into Palin-speaks-the-language-of-the-ordinary-people narrative. In fact, this Time piece adopts the latter approach and is downright adoring in tone. Their praise of Palin's Know-Nothingism could also apply to the type that Our next Republican President Jeb uses in his Esquire interview.

The Outsider: Where Is Sarah Palin Going Next? by David Von Drehle and Jay Newton-Small Time Online 07/09/09:

... Palin's unconventional step [announcing she will step down from the Alaska governorship] speaks to an ingrained frontier skepticism of authority — even one's own. Given the plunging credibility of institutions and élites, that's a mood that fits the Palin brand. Résumés ain't what they used to be; they count only with people who trust credentials — a dwindling breed. The mathematics Ph.D.s who dreamed up economy-killing derivatives have pretty impressive résumés. The leaders of congressional committees and executive agencies have decades of experience — at wallowing in red ink, mismanaging economic bubbles and botching covert intelligence.

If ever there has been a time to gamble on a flimsy résumé, ever a time for the ultimate outsider, this might be it. "We have so little trust in the character of the people we elected that most of us wouldn't invite them into our homes for dinner, let alone leave our children alone in their care," writes talk-show host Glenn Beck in his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, a pox-on-all-their-houses fusillade at Washington. Dashed off in a fever of disillusionment with those in power, Beck's book is selling like vampire lit, with more than 1 million copies in print. [my emphasis]

I don't know exactly how Beck's book has been sold. But it's not unusual for the wingnut-welfare system of Republican foundations and think tanks to boost the early sales of favored conservative books by placing large initial orders and using the books as gifts, or returning some of them later to be remaindered. Also, can even Time reporters imagine that Beck's highly partisan, rightwing Republican schtick is a "pox-on-all-their-houses" posture?

But he also does his "compassionate conservative" feint to praise the value of expertise in the context of foreign policy:

I think it's okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it's okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we're living in is incredibly complex. And simplifying things to the point where you're misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn't going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don't get inspired by shameless populism.

Palin hits similar themes to those of our next Republican President Jeb; from the Time article:

Outside her family's Dillingham smokehouse, Palin lays out a robust indictment of the Obama agenda. "President Obama is growing government outrageously, and it's immoral and it's uneconomic," she says. "The debt that our nation is incurring, trillions of dollars that we're passing on to our kids, expecting them to pay off for us, is immoral and doesn't even make economic sense. So his growth-of-government agenda needs to be ratcheted back, and it's going to take good people who have the guts to stand up to him."

She continues. The cap-and-trade energy plan "is going to drive the cost of consumer goods and the cost of energy so extremely high." Democratic health-care proposals, she says, look increasingly like the ideas that McCain proposed during the campaign. [This characterization by the writers doesn't seem to reflect the Palin quote that immediately follows.] "One thing reporters aren't asking the Administration is — it's such a simple question, and people around here in the real world, outside of Washington, D.C., want reporters to ask — President Obama, how are you going to pay for this one- or two- or three-trillion-dollar health-care plan? How are you going to pay off the stimulus package, those borrowed dollars? How are you going to pay for so many things that you are proposing and you are implementing? Americans deserve to know."

Our next Republican President Jeb would apparently like to continue his brother's work in attempting to abolish Social Security and Medicare:

It was, to the extent that my brother was unable to get the Congress to go along with meaningful entitlement reform, although he tried, which by the way the Republicans were not supportive of. It was because we fought a war, and we had to build a homeland-defense structure that didn't exist. But I think my brother gets a bad rap about the general idea that there were massive amounts of spending beyond those two things.

National security, in his view, is endangered by Medicare:

The interest on the debt, and Medicare alone, will weaken our country to the point where we're not going to have the same influence that we need to have, or should have, or want to have in the world.

And in case anyone thinks that the Catholic former Governor of Florida is going to be less Chrisitianist than his brother as President, he spells out how the Republican Party has to deal with its sins. No, not the torture program, not unjust war, not the Katrina disaster, not reckless disregard of the needs of our citizens, but the sin of losing the 2008 election to the Democrats:

In this interim period, we have to pay for our sins and show some humility.

[Q:] What are those sins?
We didn't advocate our positions well enough to win.

We're all sinners under God's watchful eye. There's a road to redemption. But the road to redemption requires some humility and some patience. To campaign on these ideas is a good way to do it. It's not about a person's ambition. It's about the power of these ideas. And they need to be developed thoughtfully, with the input of a whole lot of people and the advice of a whole lot of people. It doesn't have to be in Washington. It can grow organically... I'm going to be involved as best I can.

A glimpse at the future envisioned for us by our next Republican President Jeb Bush.

Tags: jeb bush, republican party, republicans, sarah palin

Jeb Bush

Jeb.Bush. Jeb Bush Slams Obama, Neglects To Mention Palin As Future Leader Of The GOP Huffington Post 07/07/09

Think about the implication of those words: Jeb.Bush. Bush Doctrine II. Compassionate enhanced interrogation. A kinder, gentler Predator State.

Jeb.Bush.

Tags: jeb bush

Scary

I was channel-flipping and stopped for a few seconds on C-Span. Jeb Bush was on the screen talking at some "town hall" meeting as part of the Republicans' rebranding effort. Jeb Bush. Jeb.Bush.

Tags: jeb bush

Another reason to demand legal accountability for the Cheney-Bush crimes

Haven't had enough Cheney-Bush government yet?

Well, not only do you have another few weeks of the current version. But Bush National Nightmare II is in the planning stage: Jeb: I am considering Senate run by Carol Lee and Jonathan Martin Politico 12/03/08.

The Politico article makes it sound like he's developing a "compassionate conservative strategy, or something like that:

In an interview with Politico immediately after November’s election, the former governor said the Republican Party should take four primary steps to regain favor with voters: Show no tolerance for corruption, practice what it preaches about limiting the scope of government (“There should not be such a thing as a Big Government Republican”), stand for working families and small business, and embrace reform.

Bush said conservatives should “do the math of the new demographics of the United States,” explaining that the Republican Party “can’t be anti-Hispanic, anti-young person — anti many things — and be surprised when we don’t win elections.”

I'm not sure why Politico waited a month to report on the glad tidings of the prospects for more Bush government in our future.

See additional comments at Memeorandum.

Tags: jeb bush

Dobson's World: Spare the rod and spoil the child

Teenage "boot camps" have been popular among conservatives as a response to crime among teenagers. Now that there is years worth of experience on recidivism and other performance measures of this approach, their worth is being increasingly called into question.

Then there's stuff like this from Jeb Bush's Florida: Teen lost his chance to finish turnaround: A teenager sentenced to boot camp was thriving at school, respectful at work, and - before the joyride - finally on track by Abbie Vasickle and Alex Leary St. Petersburg Times 02/12/06.

It's about a 14-year-old kid, Martin Lee Anderson, who was beaten to death by guards on his first day in a boot camp. The crime for which he was executed? He swiped his grandmother's car one Sunday morning and went on a joyride with some friends.

Imagine this. What Martin's mother experienced on her son's last day alive:

On the day she dropped him off at the camp, they shared a final embrace. "He said, "I love you' ... " Jones said.

The next time she saw Martin, he was in the hospital. Blood was running from his nose, and it looked broken, she said. His body had swollen so much that the 140-pound boy looked about 300 pounds, his father said.

Jones said the family wanted to donate his organs, but they were told they were too damaged.

The murder was videotaped, so hopefully the perpetrators will go to a real prison where sadistic killers belong. And Brother Jeb's government should be making sure that the people running juvenile prisons aren't allowed to casually brutalize and even murder their inmates.

Et tu, Brother Jeb?

It seems that not even Brother Jeb can pretend that everything is fine-and-dandy with the latest Bush dynasty disaster, the Medicare Part D plan. State will pay what Medicare missed: By the governor's order, Florida will pick up the tab for some medications that used to be covered by Medicaid by Anita Kumar and Stephen Nohlgren St. Petersburg Times 01/27/06:

Gov. Jeb Bush signed an executive order Thursday to immediately begin paying for drugs for roughly 100,000 people who used to get free drugs from the state through Medicaid but were switched to the new federal Medicare program Jan. 1.

"These are, in many cases, people who have complex medical needs that require prescription drugs for them to maintain their health, and based on the law they should not be coming out of pocket," Bush said Thursday during a visit to Washington.

The plan, which takes effect immediately, lasts until Feb. 15 but could be extended.

Bush's decision comes after weeks of confusion as pharmacists, the government and private insurance companies struggled to synchronize their computers so they could tell which plans were supposed to be serving this vulnerable Medicaid population.

Of course, the Florida branch of the Bush dynasty waited nearly a month to step in with this relief measure. Even Schwarzenegger in California was able to be more proactive than that.

So this is hardly a glowing recommendation for "compassionate conservatism". (Remember that quaint phrase?)

Brother Jeb and the flat-earthers

The St. Petersburg Times editorializes on Brother's Jeb's opposition to teaching sound science in Florida's public schools: Devolutionary science: If Florida educators are going to "establish standards that improve students' learning of science," they will not include religion.
01/04/06.

It seems that not only Brother Jeb but his faithful Department of Education director John Winn are trying to throw red meat to the flat-earthers by supporting their demand to have creationism (alias "intelligent design") taught as science in the Florida public schools. Brother Jeb didn't miss the chance to use the Terri Schiavo case to score points with the flat-earth crowd.

At the same time, they are trying to reassure suburban soccer moms and NASCAR dads who really, really, really would like to believe that the Republican Party they're voting for is not the party of the most superstitious, moralistic, intolerant scolds around who don't want anyone's kids to be able to study real science. I mean, if you aspire to have your kids grow up to be doctors or rocket scientists, they probably need some sound science education in high school to get into the right universities.

The Times writes:

Gov. Jeb Bush, who seldom lacks political certitude, has twisted himself into a pretzel over evolution. If he's trying to appease religious conservatives, he will succeed only at a cost to his own credibility and that of the public schools he calls his highest priority.

Teachers and education officials who actually concern themselves with provide sound educational opportunities for kids aren't terribly impressed with Brother Jeb's and Secretary Winn's approach:

Those educators are supposed to review science standards in the coming year, and the governor fools no one with his promise of deference. Bush and Winn already have replaced many of the professionals in the department with ideologues whose main credentials are partisanship. [K-12 Chancellor Cheri] Yecke, who was running for Congress in Minnesota before Winn hired her, once called criticism of her social-studies plan "the hate-America agenda."

The educators who don't work for Bush seem to have no problem establishing the worth of evolution, a 146-year-old theory rooted in scientific concepts. The lack of such guidelines was one reason the Fordham Institute recently awarded the state an F for its science standards. Wrote the institute: "The superficiality of the treatment of evolutionary biology alone justifies the grade F."

The governor is indeed entitled to his own religious beliefs about the origin of man, but the state's science classes are no place for them. If he insists that students meet the highest academic standards, then he should not ask that his religion dictate their science.

Not to pick nits or anything. But Brother Jeb is Catholic. True, the Ratzinger-ized Church has started for the first time pandering to the fundamentalist position on creationism. But his religion does not require him at all to adhere to the "creationist" approach to public education. His catering to the political goals of the Christian Right does.

And for Brother Jeb's team, opposing their flat-earther ideas may earn critics the label of having a "hate-America agenda".

That's today's Republican Party: a coalition of flat-earthers and plutocrats.

"Brother Jeb" Bush hearts the flat-earthers

On the face of it, it looks like Brother Jeb is trying to outdo his presidential brother in kissing up to the Christian Right. You wouldn't know it from the title of the article, though: [Jeb] Bush: Science comes before intelligent design by Daniel Ricker Miami Herald 12/26/05.

But what Ricker actually quotes Bush as saying is this:

The Watchdog Report [Ricker] asked a follow-up question: Does the governor believe in Darwin's theory of evolution?

Bush said: "Yeah, but I don't think it should actually be part of the curriculum, to be honest with you. And people have different points of view and they can be discussed at school, but it does not need to be in the curriculum." (my emphasis)

It's a real sign of the extent to which the Christian Right has become an integral part of today's Republican Party that Dubya and even that bold, independent Maverick McCain are cowtowing to them by adopting their position on creationism, aka, "intelligent design".


The current Christian Right slogan, tailored to their current legal strategy, is "teach the controversy". What it means in practice is that they want to require public schools to teach the creationist scam in science classes as science along with the theory of natural selection, aka, Darwinian evolution.

Problem is, there is no scientific "controversy" about creationism. The creationists, basing themself on a religious theory that they dress up as science for both legal and philosophical reasons, have made their own "controversy" over the theory of evolution. But it's a controversy between a particular Protestant fundamentalist religious view and a scientific view. Not one between competing scientific theories. Their attempt to dress up creationism as the "science" of intelligent design is just one more of the scams that have become the modus operandi of the Christian Right and of today's Republican Party.

You might say it's a controversy between science and a scam.

What Rickers quotes the Florida governor as saying, though, goes beyond even the current slogan of "teach the controversy". He said he doesn't think evolution should be taught in the public schools at all!

It sure sounds like Brothuh Jeb is trying to make sure nobody gits theirselves positioned to the right of him when it comes to kissin' up to the flat-earthers.

(Parenthetical note for any godless heathens among our readers: "Brother" is commonly used in Baptist churches as a ministerial title, like "Reverend" in many Protestant denominations, or "Father" for Catholic priests.)

What will Brother Jeb try next? Writing into the graduation standards for Florida high school students that they have to memorize the four Gospels word for word?

Brother Jeb's spokesman did come out later in the week with an attempt to cloud the issue a bit: Leave evolution out of standards, Bush says: The governor does not think the theory belongs in the state's school science standards; a spokesman later says he is not against teaching it St. Petersburg Times/AP 12/28/05. (The headline is definitely better than the one used by the Herald.)

On Tuesday, Bush spokesman Russell Schweiss clarified Bush's position somewhat: Evolution "is a scientific theory and he's not opposed to it being taught in classrooms," Schweiss said. "But he doesn't think it should necessarily be dictated in the standards."

Florida's science standards do not mention evolution by name but do reference some of its core principles. They were slated to be reviewed next year, but state education officials decided a few weeks ago to postpone the process until 2007 or 2008.

Bush, a Catholic who personally believes God created life on Earth, also thinks science teachers should have some discretion to discuss "any scientific theory," Schweiss said.

It sounds like Schweiss' instructions must have been something like, "try to back off from Jeb's don't-teach-evolution-at-all comment but do it without ticking off the flat-earthers".

Yep, that's the Republican Party of 2005. Its 2006 successor isn't likely to look any different. They're joined at the hip with the Christian Right. Including Brother Jeb, of course.

Spain, the Iraq War and the death penalty in Florida

Britain has been the main ally of the US in the Iraq War. But Spain is another European Union country that has backed the US effort there, and continues to do so. They have a small troop presence, but at least one Spanish soldier has died there so far.

The Spanish Minister of Defense, Frederico Trillo, was in Iraq this weekend. While there, he stressed that "Spain did not invade Iraq" and emphasized that their presence there was "solely a force of peace under the mandate of the UN." Presumably he was referring to the UN recognition of the status of the occupying powers, since the UN did not specifically authorize the invasion (although Minister Trillo apparently doesn't want to call it that).

He also insisted that the intervention in Iraq was necessary because of Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction," even though none have been found. He made a weird analogy of the WMDs with Saddam Hussein. We used to see Saddam on TV, he said, and we knew he was there. Now we don't see him, but we can't locate him. "Something similar has happened with the weapons of mass destruction: the UN inspectors had proof that this arsenal existed; on the other hand, we haven't found it."

Statements like this are the kind of thing that tends to decrease a government's credibility. But Spain's ruling conservatives, the Partido Popular (PP), and their leader, Spanish President José María Aznar, haven't encountered the difficulties that Tony Blair has in Britain. In part, that's because Spain's military and financial commitment is much smaller.

But the war was very unpopular in Spain, more unpopular than in France or Germany according to the polls. On one weekend before the war began, as much as 5% of the total population of Spain was estimated to have participated in demonstrations against the war. And the postwar polls have reflected some loss in popular support for the PP.

Aznar was in Florida this past week, among other things asking Governor Jeb Bush to commute the death sentence of a Spanish citizen condemned to die there. Given that Aznar provided Jeb's brother in the White House an important part of what little international support he received on the Iraq War, it will be interesting to see if Jeb accommodates Aznar on his death penalty request.
Tags: death penalty, florida politics, iraq war, jeb bush, spain