Hullabaloo: Jeb! vs The Donald #Thanks!

The government investigated, of course, and quite thoroughly. It created a blue ribbon, bipartisan commission which interviewed everyone involved, held public hearings and published a report in book form for the entire country to see. The hearings were particularly riveting as the nation got to hear from various insiders about what had been going on before, during and after the attacks. Most memorable was former terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who testified that he and others had been running around with their “hair on fire” trying to get the administration to focus on the high probability of an imminent terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

There was also a lot of information about the president’s response to the attacks, including the rather bizarre fact that Vice President Dick Cheney seemed to have taken over control in the early going and that the commission was not allowed to interview the president outside the VP’s presence. But with all that, there was no Select Committee on 9/11 formed after the Democrats took over the Congress in 2006 to go over the same ground. They did not belabor the issue by calling more witnesses and subpoenaing more documents and keeping the issue alive as a scab that would never heal on the backs of the families who lost loved ones on that awful day. They did not, in other words, turn 9/11 into a partisan witch hunt.

Jeb, for his part, appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday to respond to Trump’s needling, and clumsily said that “it’s what you do after [the attack] that matters”. Unfortunately, this not only stipulates that his brother did fail to keep us safe, but then invites the public to look at what he did after, which is not a record on which anyone should want to run. (The obvious question: Was attacking a country that didn’t attack us, leading to thousands more lives lost, evidence of his “keeping us safe”?)

No, Jeb Bush would be wise to simply roll his eyes at Donald Trump and let him rant on without responding, because whenever he opens his mouth, he creates a whole new set of questions. This point was driven home when Jake Tapper brought up Benghazi in this context:

TAPPER: Obviously Al Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attack of 9/11, but how do you respond to critics who ask, if your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all, how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi?

JEB BUSH: Well I — the question on Benghazi which, is hopefully we’ll now finally get the truth to, is was the place secure? They had a responsibility, the Department of State, to have proper security. There were calls for security, it looks like they didn’t get it. And how was the response in the aftermath of the attack, was there a chance that these four American lives could have been saved? That’s what the investigation is about, it’s not a political issue. It’s not about the broad policy issue, is were we doing the job of protecting our embassies and our consulates and during the period, those hours after the attack started, could they have been saved?

TAPPER: Well that’s, that’s kind of proving the point of the critics I was just asking about, because you don’t want to have your brother bear responsibility for 9/11 and I understand that argument and Al Qaeda’s responsible, but why are the terrorists not the ones who are responsible for these attacks in Libya?

BUSH: They are, of course they are but — of course they are, but if the ambassador was asking for additional security and didn’t get it, that’s a proper point and if it’s proven that the security was adequate compared to other embassies, fine, we’ll move on.

Jeb doesn’t seem to realize that every time a Republican bellows “Four Americans died on Clinton’s watch!” and in the next breath insist, “How dare you say George Bush didn’t keep us safe on his watch,” something doesn’t quite track. Even Americans who are otherwise too busy to pay attention to the granular details can tell that this is a very strange construction. If you watch the video, Jeb himself misses more than a couple of beats when Tapper brings it up — he obviously felt the dissonance.