Today’s required reading: GOP primary Presidential front-runner Jeb Bush bloviating on how working class Americans need to work longer hours so rich Americans can amass more wealth. Get the brief but cogent gist from Digby, and some more of the relevant context from Josh Marshall of TPM who gives his piece the spot-on title “We’ve Met the Doofus. And He is Jeb.”
But come on! Missouri GOP pols have been singing the same tune for donkey’s years and, as long as they up the ante on poor-bashing while enabling 2nd amendment creeps to display an ever vaster array of guns in new and unusual places, lots of Missourians don’t give a damn. Wasn’t it former State Senator Jane Cunningham who tried to undermine child labor laws just a few years ago? As I remember she got plenty of support from her GOP cohorts in the legislature before some residual shame set in. Try to top that Jebbie! Think Progress remarked at the time:
As recently as the day before President Obama moved into the White House, it was difficult to imagine even the most conservative lawmakers breaking with the 70 year-old consensus surrounding child labor laws. Welcome to the post-Tea Party era, where even the most bizarre and disastrous mistakes from America’s past are part of the right-wing’s agenda.
Actually, welcome to Missouri’s Tea Party, which, by the above criteria, seems to still be partying full blast. While granting so many tax gifties to their favorite rich pals that the state can no longer fund basic road repair, Missouri’s GOP lawmakers have tried to add to the gift-basket with a plethora of bills that increase the business bottom line at the expense of workers. To add insult to injury, the lawmakers in question are often so busy cavorting and living high on their lobbyists’ dimes that they permit the businesses in question to write (or at least dictate) the content of the bills. Thank God that Democratic Governor Nixon occasionally remembers that he’s got a veto pen.
Looks to me that Brother Jeb is just trying, in his less than lucid style, to establish the fact that he’s got his far-right economic bona fides in order and can talk economic policy with the rest of the faux-policy wonks the GOP has regurgitated into the primary field. This type of talk is standard. But the rest of us, who aren’t high on whatever it is that the GOP put in that Tea Party beverage better remember what he claims he wants to do to our hard won labor rights. Even if, as Greg Sargent speculates, Bush just garbled his answer to an interview question (which reinforces Marshall’s doofus label), what he said is revealing:
… .I don’t know whether Bush is out of touch with workers or not. But his comments are more important for what they say about his diagnosis of what ails our economy, and the contrast that sets up with the Democratic diagnosis.
It isn’t a pretty picture no matter how you parse it.