

Jeb Bush is to Republican politics what the little mechanical moles are to the arcade game Whack-A-Mole; an annoyance that bursts forth according to some malevolent algorithm and the faster you beat it down the quicker it pops back up.



Jeb! surfaced most recently to hector Republicans and conservatives to be more “civil” toward their political opponents.



Jeffrey Rodack of NewsMax reported that during an address in Hollywood, Florida, detailed in a report posted by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Bush likened the role of the president to part prime minister, part king.



Bush was critical of President Donald Trump’s “kingly” duties – the ability to set an example for younger people. We will not digress into an analysis of the various kings that we would prefer that our children not emulate, but England’s King John, Charles II, George III and Edward VIII come quickly to mind.

“The duties say if you can work hard and play by the rules you can be just like him … that’s an ‘F,’” Bush said. “That’s an important part of this, to be admired by someone that you look up to. This president doesn’t achieve that.”

And he said there is a need for leaders to place principle over personal preferences. He maintained the nation achieved leadership globally because many presidents did just that.

“They’re willing to undertake risk for a cause greater than themselves,” Bush said.

Bush also claimed political opponents can be admired even if their views are directly opposite your own.

“Don’t we all have friends that are crazy politically?” he asked. “But you have a brother or a sister that’s different than you ideologically, and you still love ’em right? So why can’t we translate that to a broader context?”

Jeb’s preaching sounds great, but how does one engage civilly with Democrats, such as CNN’s Don Lemon, who have been labeling President Trump as “the divider-in-chief” since the day he defeated Hillary Clinton and won the presidency.

After all, it is Democrats who seem to revel in calls for more violence, more mob action and less civility.

And we’re not talking about the usual college-age radicals in their fatigues, berets and Che Guevara shirts or the Soros-funded community organizers pulling down six figures while chanting “power to the people.”

And we’re not talking about whack job Democrat Rep. Maxine Waters and her calls for Leftwing mobs to “get in the face” of Republicans and Trump supporters.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents,” Waters said during a rally outside LA’s Wilshire Federal Building.

We’re talking about the leading elected officials and present and former Democratic presidential candidates.

No one is more responsible for the creation of the “angry, Leftwing mob” that the Democratic Party has become than Massachusetts’ Far Left Senator and faltering presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren: “I am angry,” she declared during one of the more raucous “Stop Kavanaugh” mob scenes, “I own it. I am angry.”

Another failed Democratic presidential candidate, California’s Far Left Senator Kamala Harris, has also distinguished herself as one of the Democratic Party’s least civil members, indeed she has made incivility a central part of her political brand.

As National Review contributor Jonathan S. Tobin noted, “Harris may lack the talent to fulfill her not-so-secret desire to emulate Barack Obama by parlaying a single unfinished term in the Senate into a successful presidential bid. But there’s no question that on the strength of these [Senate Intelligence Committee] hearings, she can lay claim to a style that is the future of American politics: Her combination of incivility, bullying, and victimhood makes her the perfect reflection of our current moment.”

New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who vied with Kamala Harris to turn the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing into a launching pad for his now-aborted presidential campaign also embraced incivility as part of his brand.



As the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft reported, after bumbling through a long-winded response about “radical love” and being civil to even those you disagree with, Booker took a turn and endorsed Waters’ call to action.

“If I saw an administrator out and about — there is nothing wrong with confronting that person,” Booker said.

The least surprising entrant in the Democratic incivility sweepstakes is Hillary Clinton, who told CNN's Christiane Amanpour, "You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about… That's why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and or the Senate, that's when civility can start again."

In other words, civility only occurs when Democrats are in power. When they are out of power, anything goes.



What Jeb Bush calls “civility” is a return to the days when establishment Republicans, such as his late father, sat back and let Democrats make them into punching bags, never responding in kind as Democrats destroyed them in their pursuit of power and steadily undermined the principles the Republican establishment allegedly stood for.

The result of that strategy was a steady erosion of the Republican brand, because, if you won’t stand and fight for those principles in which Jeb Bush always tries to wrap himself, no one believes you actually hold them. One thing Donald Trump will never be is a punching bag, and as a consequence of what Jeb Bush and his ilk view as Trump’s incivility, the Republican Party has returned to its roots as a political movement that fights for its principles, rather than politely compromising them away.