George H.W. Bush goes off script. Sorry, Jeb?

Former President George H.W. Bush, aka Poppy Bush, has released a book. You have probably heard by now that it is distinctly unflattering to two members of the George W. Bush presidency; he thinks Dick Cheney became "very hard line" after 9/11, and for once a Republican doesn't mean "hard line" in a good way, but he reserves most of his fatherly spite for George's Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who "served the president badly."

"I don't like what he did, an I think it hurt the President, having his iron-ass view of everything, Bush told Meacham. "There's a lack of humility, a lack of seeing what the other guy thinks. He's more kick ass and take names, take numbers. I think he paid a price for that."

President Bush the Elder has not been in the best of health these past few years, and so if he's going to be releasing a biography he probably is keen on getting it out there sooner rather than later. Writing a book in which you publicly distance yourself from your own son's administration, though, is pretty damn harsh. Granted, Bush the Elder feels that the things that went wrong (he still supports his son's inexplicable invasion of Iraq, or at least is still willing to stick to that script) went wrong because of the people surrounding George W. Bush, and not because his son mini-George was in fact the person screwing all those things up hisownself. The message, though, is still clear: Yes, even I, the boy's father, admit that my son's administration was chock-full of screwuptitude.

This has got to be causing heartburn for Jeb!. Jeb has staked his campaign on the notion that everyone is misremembering the George W. Bush years, which were actually full of peace and security and "he kept us safe" while standing on rubble-piles; Jeb Bush is his own man, he says, but you couldn't tell it from the Bush family advisers he surrounds himself with or his steadfast insistence that all those old Bush policies, both economic and military, would work out great the next time around. Now even Pa Bush is piping up with memories of the bad times and of a White House filled with "hard line,""iron-ass" eff-ups, and that does not do Jeb! much good. No, Jeb says, the Iraq War went fine—stop saying it didn't! We just needed to keep trying!

So Jeb! Bush is no doubt going to be asked about this, and now we all get to sit back and watch to see how Jeb is going to screw up on this question too. Because he's going to screw it up, he just is. As for Rumsfeld, he has already responded by not-too-subtly implying that Bush the Elder is just going senile.

Wow --> This Rumsfeld stmt to NBC on Bush 41: “Bush 41 is getting up in years and misjudges Bush 43, who I found made his own decisions"

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) November 5, 2015

So there you go.