Jeb Bush Is a Hothead by tristero

Jeb Bush Is a Hothead

by tristero

Frank Bruni reports a very mistaken stereotype:

As brothers who governed large states at the same time, each Bush was bound to be defined in terms of the other. George was the impulsive one who’d stumbled and then swaggered toward success. Jeb was the cogitator, the toiler. George was the extrovert: He worked the room. Jeb was the introvert: He read the books.

In fact, Jeb Bush is just as hotheaded as George W was, and cannot be trusted with the power of high office. Case in point:

Hours after a judge ordered that Terri Schiavo wasn't to be removed from her hospice, a team of Florida law enforcement agents was en route to seize her and have her feeding tube reinserted -- but they stopped short when local police told them they would enforce the judge's order, the Miami Herald has learned. 

Agents of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement told police in Pinellas Park, the small town where Schiavo lies at Hospice Woodside, that they were on the way to take her to a hospital to resume her feeding Thursday. 

For a brief period, local police, who have officers around the hospice to keep protesters out, prepared for what sources called a showdown. 

In the end, the state agents and the Department of Children and Families backed down, apparently concerned about confronting local police outside the hospice. 

"We told them that unless they had the judge with them when they came, they were not going to get in," said a source with the local police. 

"The FDLE called to say they were en route to the scene," said an official with the city police who requested anonymity. "When the Sheriff's Department, and our department, told them they could not enforce their order, they backed off." 

The incident, known only to a few, underscores the intense emotion and murky legal terrain that the Schiavo case has created. 

It also shows that agencies answering directly to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush had planned to use a wrinkle in state law that would have allowed them to legally get around the judge's order. The exception in the law allows public agencies to freeze a judge's order whenever an agency appeals it. [Italics added.]

Note the careful wording in the italics but let's be clear: No one in these agencies would have dared to take upon themselves the task of rushing over to Schiavo's bedside to seize custody of her without Jeb Bush's explicit (and surely verbal) order to do so. Apparently, only when the full consequences of his reckless behavior became clear to him, he changed his mind rescinded his order.

This is not someone who can be trusted in an emergency, when he would have access to the launch codes to nuclear weapons which might be impossible to call back if he again regretted an impulsive decision.

Regardless of how extreme his politics really are, Jeb Bush is not the kind of person who should be president.