I could be wrong, but I’m getting the sense that Jeb Bush doesn’t understand how irony works.

The same guy who insists on claiming that his brother “kept us safe” while presiding over the actual antithesis of safety is now claiming he — after making his fortune on the backs of his family’s political careers — will end “crony capitalism.”

As Bush wrote in a statement published on his website earlier today, “As president of the United States, I will use all the powers of my office to disrupt the political culture of a dysfunctional Washington, D.C. We need to clean house and it must start by eliminating the crony capitalism that is pervasive throughout the federal government.”

Ha freaking ha.

Does Bush really expect anyone to believe that he is the man for the job of disrupting the political culture in Washington DC? The same man whose father and brother served a combined 28 years in prominent DC-based jobs, ranging from Congressman to RNC Chair to President of the United States? The same man whose personal income spiked during the very years in which his father and brother had their most prominent DC-based jobs? From Mother Jones:

In 1988, Bush formed a company with GOP donor David Eller to market water pumps manufactured by Moving Water Industries, another Eller business, to foreign countries. The company used Bush’s White House ties to drum up business. In 1992, at the behest of MWI, the Export-Import Bank approved $74 million in US-backed loans to Nigeria to buy water pumps from Eller’s company. The Justice Department later alleged in a 2002 civil suit that about $28 million of those loans were used to bribe a Nigerian official. Bush was not implicated, but in November 2013, a jury found MWI guilty of making 58 false claims to the Export-Import Bank on its applications for the Nigerian loans. A federal judge fined the company $580,000. Bush escaped testifying after the judge determined his testimony wouldn’t be relevant to the central issue in the case.

And:

Cuban American real estate developer Armando Codina was the Florida chair of George H.W. Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 bid for the GOP presidential nomination. He loved the Bush family so much that when Jeb first moved to Miami in the early 1980s, he made Bush a partner in his real estate company and gave him 40 percent of the profits—even though Jeb had no real estate experience or money to invest. In 1985, Bush and Codina bought an office building partially financed by a savings and loan that later failed. The $4.56 million loan went into default, but federal regulators gave Bush and his partner a pass. Instead of foreclosing, they merely asked them to repay $500,000 of the loan. Taxpayers picked up the rest. In 1991, Bush and Codina sold the building for $8 million.

Bush may be correct in saying, as he does in his statement, that “There are tens of billions of dollars of corporate welfare subsidies tucked into the federal budget. An honest effort to cut the deficit should start here.” But an honest effort to tackle the tens of billions of dollars of corporate welfare subsidies that are tucked into the federal budget should start by admitting why those subsidies are still there: past Presidents Bush.

And for his part, Bush should admit that if he knows anything about how to stop crony capitalists, it’s only because he knows how to be one.