Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, the GOP's Hamlet and Don Quixote, Are Seriously Out of Control

Houston, we have a problem. But it's not about a spaceship. It's about politics. Republican politics. ~~~~~ First, we've been listening to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush tell us he may decide to run for President in 2016, but he hasn't decided yet because he has to figure out how to win GOP primaries without compromising his principles. Now, Jeb says it’s about a "realistic assessment of whether the journey he wants to travel is compatible with winning a primary,” according to Al Cardenas, a longtime friend who was the Florida GOP chairman when Jeb Bush was Governor. Though he is deeply conservative on some issues such as taxes and abortion, in other ways, Bush - culturally and philosophically - is out of step with the grass-roots activists who now are the base of the Republican Party. Jeb says he is anti-abortion and against gay marriage, but he wants Republicans to find consensus with Democrats, especially on fiscal issues. And he has pushed for an immigration overhaul that would include a path to citizenship for people who are here illegally, and he also has championed the Common Core educational standards, two red-flag issues among Republican activists. Jeb has been told by James Baker, among others, according to the New York Times, that he should push ahead staying true to his principles and yet, somehow, seize the GOP nomination EVEN IF HE CAN'T WIN THE GOP PRIMARIES, controlled by conservative Republicans - primaries that would give him the convention delegate count he will need to have any chance of being nominated. The way I see it, these people are smoking rope -- if Jeb Bush wants the GOP presidential nomination, he must either accept the basic principles of the GOP base or convince them that his views are better. Either way, it will require that Jeb get his hair messed up and his suit rumpled in the GOP primary battles. There is no other way. Forget stealing the nomination on the convention floor after somebody else has done the work and won the delegates. It ain't gonna happen.The GOP went through the stolen-convention scene in 1964 and it was a disaster. Suck it up, Jeb, and get in or get out of the way. ~~~~~ And, while Jeb plays Hamlet, a second scenario is playing out in the Senate, where Texas Senator Ted Cruz has apparently burned his law books and Senate Rules book in favor of Don Quixote. Cruz snatched defeat from the jaws of victory without so much as an apology to the GOP leaders who had worked hard and long to forge a bi-partisan consensus permitting the unopposed passage of the $1.1 trillion budget bill. Democratic liberals were upset about the repeal of a banking regulation and Republican conservatives were unhappy that it failed to challenge Obama's immigration moves. But the Senate leaders held them in line. Until, without consulting anyone except Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul, Cruz began to demand procedural votes that allowed the Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid, to take one last stand as outgoing head of the Senate, thus unraveling the bi-partisan agreement to give the Senate the weekend off and defer the passage of the bill until early this coming week. Instead, Reid called a daylong Saturday session to ask for consideration of Obama appointees, including judges, something that, without Ted Cruz's intervention, would have been left to the Republican Senate in January, with a very different outcome assured. Asked if Cruz had created an opening for the Democrats, Senator Orrin Hatch said, "I wish you hadn't pointed that out." ~~~~~ Dear readers, with friends like Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, the GOP doesn't need enemies. The Republican Party desperately needs a leader -- not Speaker Boehner or Senate Leader McConnell, whose job plates are full to overflowing -- but someone, may I say a Mitt Romney, to bring order and consensus to a party that has for too long been leaderless.