People keep saying and saying and saying that Jeb was going to win – but I was nearly 100% sure it would never happen, I wrote that several times BEFORE Trump entered the race, and I think I was correct. Obviously, since Trump did enter the race, I can’t prove it, but you cannot prove your thesis either and I think you are absolutely wrong.

Jeb didn’t just lose to Trump. He came in no higher than fourth in every race he entered. He never would have won, even without Trump.

I have to disagree. Absent Trump, Jeb probably would have had the nomination, and then gone on to lose to Hillary…badly.

I say that because the Establishment wanted Jeb, badly. He was their vehicle to finally get that immigration amnesty passed. They had tried and failed in 2006, 2007, and 2013, and 2013 cost the GOP majority leader his Congressional seat. But by 2016 they had Paul Ryan in the Speaker’s chair, the GOP in the Senate were always on board, and if they had Jeb, done deal.

The GOP leadership knew perfectly well that the GOP rank and file voters wanted Jeb like they wanted a root canal. But they tried to set it up so that they would get Jeb anyway. The plan was that Jeb would come in second or third to different opponents in the earlier contests, many of which were proportional. A lot of the big later States were winner take all.

So Jeb builds up a critical mass of delegates even if he doesn’t outright win many contests in the earlier season. The other candidates just win one or two here or there, and their money dries up. Then a relatively uncontested Jeb vacuums up those winner take all States and boom: nominated.

BOTH parties tried to do something like this in 2016. The Dems set it up so that this time it was Hillary, Dammit, no more nonsense. The GOP wanted it set up so that all roads led to Jeb. The Dems succeeded, the GOP failed spectacularly.

The Inevitable Jeb had a bunch of problems, most of them self-inflicted. The first thing to remember is that the Establishment always preferred Jeb. But W was the better politician in practice, and of the three Bush men (Bush Sr., Jeb, and Bush Jr.), Dubya is the best/least bad. If you have to have a Bush, W is the one to take (which is not to excuse his failings).

But Jeb in 2016 also gave the distinct impression that he was running out of some sense of family duty, he never seemed enthusiastic…EXCEPT…when addressing Spanish-speaking crowds in Spanish. Then he came across as lively and engaged! Which was an absolutely terrible optic after the multiple attempts at Comprehensive Amnesty in previous years. The GOP base was in a fury about immigration and he wanted more of it (immigration, not fury).

His lack of enthusiasm made Trump’s ‘low energy Jeb’ hit devastatingly effective.

He also made his infamous ‘lose the primary to win the general’ comment, and that played right into the precise things the GOP base did not want to hear. Obviously he didn’t mean it literally, but it was the old ‘the socons are losing it for us!’ nonsense. It was a promise of ‘economic conservative/social liberal’. It was _precisely_ what the GOP voters wanted less of.

Jeb tried to distance himself from W’s legacy…on precisely the points where the voters agreed with W. He embraced W’s legacy on the very things that had alienated the voters. It was almost a master class in how not to do it.

Trump, whatever his other failings, served his country by blocking Hillary and Jeb from power at the same time.

The Democrats were openly chanting “Bush Lied!” from about 2002 on. There was nothing new about that. The problem was that Bush II refused to fight back. That was the GOP SOP from 1994 on, whenever the Dems would lie about them, they would just try to ‘rise above it’, or ignore it. Eventually, people start to assume the allegation must be true, since the GOP never fought back. Today, a lot of Republicans believe Bush lied about the WMDs, precisely because he kept silent when he should have spoken up. He finally tried to defend himself when Trump accused him of lying, and he was telling the truth, but it was ten years too late.

One of the things Trump and DeSantis have in common is that they _do_ fight back.

“George W’s mistake was squandering the brilliant military victory by turning the peace over to Colin Powell and Richard Armitage. Rumsfeld’s Defense Department planned to bring in the ex-Pat group who understood the issues and let them sort out Iraq. Bush bought Powell’s argument that managing the Peace was State Department’s purview. They froze out the ex-Pat group and turned the post war period into a purely American venture. They put an American face on all of the problems.
Ironically, the State Department, with media assistance, has tried to blame the chaos on Rumsfeld and Defense, even though they lobbied for control.

Sadly, I think similar mistakes were made in Afghanistan; although I am not certain that Afghanistan could not have been rehabilitated. That is a wild hunch; as there is little evidence other than that there was at least a semi-functional middle class in the cities during the monarchy.” — Oldflyer

One of the mistakes American made, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is to assume that what would replace the outgoing regimes would be a Western-style liberal democracy, which was fundamentally _impossible_ in both places. But a functioning, at least semi-civilized _state_ was probably possible. Not necessarily a democracy, though it would be nice if it had the possibility to move in that direction later. But a state, that could keep some kind of order. Something simple. America has done similar things in the past, though admittedly that was before our current feckless ruling class was running things.

Furthermore, our ruling elite (both parties) are hyper-secular. They desperately wanted to avoid engaging with the religious aspects of the wars, and that was fatal. There is no escape from religion in this world. Thus we had the ridiculous spectacle of the American embassy in Kabul loudly celebrating ‘pride month’ in a fundamentalist Islamic land, apparently blissfully unaware of the natural effect of that.

But the problem was not just in Iraq and Afghanistan. All the way back in 1991, when the USSR collapsed, the ‘help’ the West sent was worse than nothing. They tried to export Western economic theory and social policy, and the result was the rise of the oligarchs.

We see this same pattern over and over. We saw in South Sudan, where Western ‘advisers’ tried to implement classic economic liberalism and sometimes Randianism. We see it in Africa with the gay agenda. Generally, the right wing half of the ruling elite wants to export Ayn Rand, the left wing wants to export John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Neither works, and the failure modes are boringly repetitive.

One of the reasons there is such revulsion at both Trump and DeSantis is that the logical implication of the popular revolt against the current policies is that the current ruling class gets marginalized, and they don’t want to be marginalized.

Thanks. Given the company, that’s a substantial compliment.

Politics is downstream from culture and presuming ancient cultures were the same as ours–which nobody actually does but as you point out expects their politics to be as if they are. I think that’s a sentence.

Thanks again.

Richard, this is one of the best statements I have ever read in neo’s comments. Not just military, historical “what ifs” are always dicey. Furthermore people using them tend to project today’s politics back decades if not centuries.

This is the army–not referring to the party military like the Republican Guard–which could barely get out of its own way in either Gulf 1 or the Bush post 9-11 op.

Talked to a couple guys in Gulf 1 who were MP in the POW business. Unlike their training, they discovered they had to keep the Sunni and the Shia soldiers apart or they’d be trying to kill each other in riots in the POW camps.

Depending on this rabble to arrange things all nice and neat would be really, really stupid but…since it wasn’t tried, it couldn’t possibly fail.

(1) Trump publicly questioned the competence and integrity of the CIA. Not just with WMDs but also the JFK assassination.

(2) Trump successfully attacked the Bush & Cheney families and they are Deep State royalty. Why did Liz Cheney sacrifice her political career to attack Trump? Pure loathing of how Trump smeared her father.

(3) Trump prevented Hillary from winning the presidency, but in the process of losing Hillary got the Deep State headed down the rabbit hole of Trump / Russian collusion. Rather than hating Hillary for setting them up, they doubled down on hatred for Trump because he refused to quit, resulting in the FBI and political insiders looking very bad.

Alas, with Covid the Deep State finally trapped Trump and secured his exit from the White House. But Trump still won’t quit!