Jeb Bush campaign video blasts Obama for not supporting Israel
Glad to see Jeb Bush out front on Israel - I didn't expect him to make us a centerpiece of his campaign.
In this campaign ad, Bush blasts Obama and Kerry for not supporting Israel (curiously, on the same day that a Rasmussen poll finds that most Americans believe that the US should stay out of the current dispute between Israel and the 'Palestinians').
Let's go to the videotape.
So why do most Americans think the US should stay out?
Because Obama is supporting the 'Palestinians' (or at least being 'even-handed') which is worse than staying out.
And because Obama's idea of interference is to blame Israel and the 'lack' of a 'peace process.'
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Jeb Bush, John Kerry, Middle East peace process, Palestinian terrorism, US presidential campaign 2016
Rubio campaign site has Stand with Israel page
The campaign site of Marco Rubio, who officially announced himself as a candidate for President on Monday, has a
Stand with Israel page on his campaign site (Hat Tip:
Sunlight).
He knows who his friends are.
It's kind of funny reading the Leftist media's critiques of Rubio. This is the
New York Times (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
Marco Rubio, who announced his bid for the presidency on Monday in a call to donors, has been called the “best communicator” in the Republican Party. Over and over and over again.
But he has little to show for it.
He enters the fray
with surprisingly low support. Despite four years of national
prominence, he has averaged 6 percent of the vote in primary polls over
the last few months. That’s the same or worse than five candidates who
are thought to have a much smaller chance of winning the nomination: Ted
Cruz, Rand Paul, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie. Mr.
Rubio is acceptable to many but, so far, the first choice of few.
Mr.
Rubio’s struggle to break through is a powerful reminder that winning a
presidential primary is not just about skill as a politician. It’s
about positioning, and Mr. Rubio, at the moment, is in a much worse
position than many assessments of his political talent would suggest. In
basketball terms, he’s boxed out.
His central problem is that
Jeb Bush
has found considerable support from the party’s mainstream conservative
and moderate donors in the so-called invisible primary — the
behind-the-scenes competition for elite support that often decides the
nomination.
I don't think the country wants another Bush v. another Clinton. And ultimately, as the field thins, if Rubio ends up being the only conservative in the race, I think he will gain support. Then again, I would say the same thing about Ted Cruz. (You all should know by now that I am a big fan of both of them).
The New Republic is
downright nasty to Rubio (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
If Rubio were both serious and talented enough to move his party away
from its most inhibiting orthodoxy, in defiance of those donors, his
candidacy would represent a watershed. His appeal to constituencies
outside of the GOP base would be both sincere and persuasive.
But
Rubio is not that politician. He is no likelier to succeed at persuading
Republican supply-siders to reimagine their fiscal priorities than he
was at persuading nativists to support a citizenship guarantee for
unauthorized immigrants. In fact, nobody understands the obstacles
facing Marco Rubio better than Marco Rubio. But rather than abandon his
reformist pretensions, or advance them knowing he will ultimately lose,
Rubio has chosen to claim the mantle of reform and surrender to the
right simultaneously—to make promises to nontraditional voters he knows
he can’t keep. My colleague Danny Vinik proposes that
Rubio wants to "improve the lives of poor Americans" but he must
"tailor [his] solutions to gain substantial support in the GOP, and
those compromises would cause more harm to the poor." I think this makes
Rubio the most disingenuous candidate in the field.
But as we all know,
campaigns are one thing and being
in office is
something else.
Nevertheless, political polling site fivethirtyeight.com, which also leans Left, calls Rubio the
first serious Republican candidate to declare (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign, which officially kicks off
Monday, has so far attracted paltry support from Republican voters,
according to polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as nationally. He’s down near Chris Christie! Yet, when we talk about him in the FiveThirtyEight office,
we usually put Rubio in the top tier, in front of everyone except Jeb
Bush and Scott Walker, the two candidates at the top of the polls.
Why? Rubio is both electable and conservative, and in optimal proportions. He’s in a position
to satisfy the GOP establishment, tea party-aligned voters and social
conservatives. In fact, Rubio’s argument for the GOP nomination looks a
lot like Walker’s, and Rubio is more of a direct threat to the Wisconsin
governor than he is to fellow Floridian Bush.
To win a presidential nomination, you need to make it past the party
actors (i.e., elected officials and highly dedicated partisans). You can
have all the strong early poll numbers in the world (hello, Rudy Giuliani),
and your candidacy can still fail if party bigwigs come out against
you. Rubio has a real chance of surviving — or even winning — the
invisible (or endorsement) primary.
Rubio doesn’t have the flaws the other two official GOP candidates
have. He’s a hawk on foreign policy (with an 89 percent conservative
foreign policy score in National Journal’s vote ratings), so he’ll be able to avoid the pitfalls of Rand Paul’s candidacy. And Rubio isn’t anywhere near as extreme
as Ted Cruz and has not alienated his fellow senators, so we shouldn’t
expect mainstream party members coming out of the woodwork to stop
Rubio. But he’s a solid conservative; statistical ideological ratings
put him right in line with the average Republican in the 113th Congress.
The analysis is fascinating.
Read the whole thing.
But what I like best about Rubio is that he says flat out that he would
reverse President Obama's foreign policy - a foreign policy of which Hillary Clinton was an architect (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
Rubio also vowed to reverse course on Obama's recent diplomatic endeavors with Iran,
with which the United States is working to finalize a nuclear pact, and
Cuba, with which Obama has opened diplomatic relations.
"I think from a national-security perspective, this deal with Iran is an
extremely dangerous one," Rubio said when asked what he would do on his
first day as president. "I think the next president of the United
States is going to have to deal with that on day number one."
Of the diplomatic opening with Cuba, Rubio said, "I would reverse every single one of the decisions that [Obama] made."
That's music to my ears.
Labels: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Republican party, Republicans, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, US presidential campaign 2016
Cross Jeb Bush off my list?
I may be able to cross Jeb Bush off the list of potential candidates for whom I would vote. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bush's foreign policy is more likely to be like his father's than his brother's. George W. Bush may not have been perfect (although between 2002-05 he was awfully close to it), but he was far better than his father,
George H.W. Bush, whose hostility to Israel has only been exceeded by Barack Hussein Obama and Jimmy Carter since Israel gained its independence in 1948 (Hat Tip:
Memeorandum).
One early indication suggests he is leaning toward his
father’s more pragmatic and restrained philosophy. The former Florida
governor is considering naming Meghan O’Sullivan as his top
foreign-policy aide; several people familiar with the deliberations
describe her as the front-runner for the post.
In many ways, the 45-year-old Ms. O’Sullivan, who now teaches at Harvard, bridges the two Bush worlds. She
served as deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan for
much of George W. Bush ’s second term and was heavily involved in
carrying out his Iraq policies. But she wasn’t among the neoconservative
advisers who drove the initial decision to invade Iraq, and she is more
closely aligned with—and is being promoted by—the kind of pragmatists
who dominated George H.W. Bush ’s presidency.
Daniel Larison
doesn't believe it.
If that is supposed to be a sign that Bush’s foreign policy won’t
be like his brother’s, what would be evidence that it will? Choosing
someone “heavily involved” in carrying out George W. Bush’s policy in
Iraq to be a “top foreign policy aide” is practically an endorsement of
that policy. It certainly doesn’t suggest that Bush thinks there was
very much wrong with how his brother’s administration handled things.
O’Sullivan served as an assistant to the staggeringly incompetent Paul Bremer at the CPA in the early days of the occupation. She was an early advocate
of the “surge,” which should make it clear that she isn’t as much of a
“pragmatist” as this article would lead us to believe. Short of choosing
a leading Iraq war booster, Bush could hardly be making his agreement
with his brother’s policies more obvious.
No one should be fooled when someone claims that Jeb Bush is
following in his father’s footsteps on foreign policy. George W. Bush
indulged in some rhetoric about “humility” and realism as a candidate,
too, and he relied on his father’s reputation on foreign policy to make
up for the fact that he knew nothing about it. It turned out that there
was no substance to Bush’s rhetoric, and the country endured the effects
of one of the most incompetent administrations on foreign policy in our
modern history. We have the benefit of that experience, so there is no
excuse for falling for the same con twice.
So Larison is arguing that Jeb Bush is 'as incompetent' on foreign policy as his brother? What could go wrong?
Labels: foreign policy, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Iraq, Jeb Bush, realism, realists' fantasy
