Boy, does Jeb! Bush want to win the Koch lottery or what? Because he just wrote off the votes of millions of senior citizens by telling them he really does mean it when he says he wants to end Medicare. And Social Security to boot.

At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, an elderly woman blasted Bush. "We're not going to have adequate coverage for our children or our grandchildren without Medicare," she told him. "I paid into that for years and years, just like all these other seniors here, and now you want to take it away?" Why, she asked, is he "always attacking the seniors."



"Well, I'm not," Bush responded. "Here's what I said: I said, 'We're going to have to reform our entitlement system.' We have to." "It's not an entitlement," the woman shot back. "I earned that." "It's an actuarially unsound health care system," said Bush, who said something must be done before the system burdens future generations with $50 billion of debt. "Social Security is an underfunded retirement system; people have put money into it, for sure. "The people that are receiving these benefits, I don't think that we should touch that; but your children and grandchildren are not going to get the benefit of this that they believe they’re going to get, or that you think they're going to get, because the amount of money put in compared to the amount of money the system costs is wrong."

Um, let's just revisit what Jeb! actually said about Medicare that set this protest off. He said, "we need to figure out a way to phase out this program." Now, "phasing out" could be construed as "reform," if you're a Republican. But for the rest of us, it pretty much means "ending."

Jeb! says all of this is just the media using "words taken out of context — exactly what I predicted would happen." His team tried to spin this as their candidate trying to address "the way we look at entitlements," and said that it shouldn't be considered a policy pronouncement, because why would he do that by just dropping it into an answer at a town hall meeting. Which, pretty much, it seems like he just did. As the Politico reporter on this story puts it, "it appears Bush is more frustrated that Democrats took his words literally, not 'out of context.'"

Jeb! has said that Medicare has to end and he thinks his brother's idea to privatize Social Security needs to be brought back. Any context Jeb! tries to put that in is still bad.