Cracks in the Bush-Bush-Bush alliance

Poor Jeb.    First, his brother George jumped in and took his intended place in the White House.    Now when it looks like Jeb's chance finally came, he's having to deal with George's mixed legacy.  Is he an asset or a liability?   Should he use him on the campaign trail . . . or just at fund raisers?    Or tell him to get lost?

Poor Jeb is having to combat questions like:   "Is your campaign dead? and "Do you really want to be president?" and "Why didn't your brother prevent the 9/11 attack?" and "What about your daughter's drug addiction?"   And now Poppy Bush is piling on.  A new biography of Bush 41 by Jon Meacham, due out next week, has some delicious criticism from Poppy Bush of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld . . . and, yes, . . of Dubya himself.

Of Cheney, Bush 41 is quoted as having told the biographer: 

"He had his own empire there and marched to his own drummer. . . .  He just became very hard-line and very different from the Dick Cheney I knew and worked with [Cheney was his Sec. of Defense]  Just iron-ass. . . . knuckling under to the real hard-charging guys who want to fight about everything, use force to get our way in the Middle East. . . ."

"The big mistake that was made was letting Cheney bring in kind of his own State Department. . . .  I think they overdid that. But it’s not Cheney’s fault. It’s the president’s fault.  The buck stops there."

Bush 41 was even harder in his criticism of Donald Rumsfeld, Bush 43's Defense Secretary, who "served the president badly." 

"I don’t like what he did, and I think it hurt the president having his iron-ass view of everything. I’ve never been that close to him anyway. There’s a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He’s more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that. . . .  Rumsfeld was an arrogant fellow and self-assured, swagger." 

Bush 43 said he had never heard these opinions from Bush 41 himself. 

"He certainly never expressed that opinion to me, either during the presidency or after. . . .  I valued Dick’s [Cheney] advice, but he was one of a number of my advisers I consulted, depending on the issue. . . .  And in any event, I disagree with his characterization of what was going on. I made the decisions. This was my philosophy."

*     *     *

This is not a political hack job by a hostile biographer.   The book ads say that Meacham had interviews with Bush 41, plus access to his and his wife's diaries and cooperation of the Bush family.

I'm not puzzled that Poppy Bush had these opinions.  What I'm trying to figure out is what they think is the advantage of publishing this now.   The only way it could possibly be a calculated strategy to help Jeb is if they've decided to distance him from Dubya after all.  So I'm inclined to think that they cooperated in giving the biographer access, but they did not have content control -- and that they didn't know these criticisms were going to be in there.

The timing couldn't have been worse for Jeb.   It's only going to add to the widespread feeling that "we've had enough of the Bushes."

Ralph

ADDED LATER:   And then there's the just-released movie "Truth," starring Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett, about the CBS-Dan Rather debacle about the fake documentation of a claim that George W. Bush failed to fulfill his National Guard duties for most of a year.   Although the documents may have been forged (not by CBS and Rather but by someone who leaked them to them), many people were convinced that what they allegded was true.   Whatever the truth, it's going to be more publicity of the negative side of Jeb's brother.