Jeb Bush continues to stumble along, unable to repudiate his brother's legacy - if not actually embracing it. He is surrounding himself with members of the same cabal that led the country into disaster in Iraq; he is trying to pass himself off as some kind of 'moderate' but that dog won't hunt in the GOP today.
Charles P. Pierce continues to observe the latest feckless scion of the Bush clan seeking to lead the country, and marvels at the clueless way he's trying to sell GOP snake oil.
Paul Krugman is taking note as well, and discusses the larger issue of the Fraternity of Failure, a political party in which the facts don't matter and the record is something to be ignored. His concluding paragraph asks a worrisome question:
What’s going on here? My best explanation is that we’re witnessing the effects of extreme tribalism...
...It doesn’t matter that the skeptics have been proved right. Simply raising questions about the orthodoxies of the moment leads to excommunication, from which there is no coming back. So the only “experts” left standing are those who made all the approved mistakes. It’s kind of a fraternity of failure: men and women united by a shared history of getting everything wrong, and refusing to admit it. Will they get the chance to add more chapters to their reign of error?
Krugman is on to something here. My own thoughts (submitted to the Times but probably won't make the cut) are thus:
Tribalism is definitely the word to describe what is going on here. The Republican Party runs on a "You're either with us or against us" dynamic. Facts don't matter. The record doesn't matter. What matters is if you are a member of the tribe in good standing or not.
It used to be if you lived in this country, you were automatically a member of the America tribe (if you were the right skin color/ethnic background/religion/sex). And for those who needed a defining 'other' to unite the tribe against, the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union and Global Communism did a pretty good job at that.
Funny thing happened though - the enemy empire collapsed and at home the America tribe became aware that more and more of those seeking membership were people of color, people of the female persuasion, people of 'that' religion or no religion at all, and people who had been hiding in closets.
Needless to say, a tribe anyone can belong to is no tribe at all - which is why the GOP politics of division have prospered. They're trying to defend the old tribal boundaries, and a lot of people are good with that. They don't care about facts or the record - they just want that old tribal feeling again. The GOP field is auditioning to play the Tribal Chief, and woe to anyone who gets in their way.
Chiefs need enemies to blame for their failures after all, and to keep everyone scared so they stay in line. And that's what holds the tribe together - not their record or facts.