Do Republicans have a fundamental problem with listening? First:
Kelly: Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?
Bush: I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.
Kelly: You don’t think it was a mistake?
Bush: In retrospect, the intelligence that everybody saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty.
This even caused Laura Ingraham to lose her shit:
LAURA INGRAHAM: What he said was just rubbish. And when he is asked a simple question, by the way, good for Megyn Kelly, what was the question: Knowing what we know now, not if you were in the same exact circumstance as your brother would you authorize this war, knowing what you know now. Namely that there were no WMDs, we got bad intelligence, if you had known those things, would you—
He said yes, I would authorize the war. That, in my mind, reveals, it is a sneak peak as to what Jeb is going to face come general election should he win the nomination…
She said knowing what you know now, would you still authorize the invasion, to which I said yes I would, and so would Hillary. No, Hillary wouldn’t, Hillary wouldn’t authorize the war now, if she knew what she knew now then. No, of course not!
That’s just a fun hypothetical, but you have to say ‘No’ to that; you can’t say, ‘Yes, I’d still would have gone into Iraq.’
Or if you do, then there has to be something wrong with you. You can’t still think going into Iraq now, as a sane human being, was the right thing to do. That’s like you have no ability to learn from past mistakes at all. When the past mistakes were made by your brother…
But that’s not the rub. This awesome walkback is:
Bush’s old pal, Republican cable news strategist Ana Navarro, said on CNN this morning that Jeb told her he misheard the question.
Ana Navarro, a former aide to ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R), said on CNN Tuesday that the potential presidential candidate told her he’d misheard a question about the Iraq War.
Navarro, who was Bush’s director of immigration policy in the governor’s office, said on CNN’s “New Day” that she’d emailed Bush on Tuesday morning for clarification about his comments.
“I emailed him this morning and I said to him, ‘Hey, I’m a little confused by this answer so I’m genuinely wondering did you mishear the question?’” Navarro said. “And he said, ‘Yes, I misheard the question.’”
No, Jeb. You answered the question you wanted to answer because to answer truthfully would impugn your brother’s judgement.
I ain’t done. The clown car has a “hearing problem” too:
A large group of Republican presidential candidates gathered in South Carolina over the weekend for the “Freedom Summit” event, and a CNN correspondent asked much of the field an interesting question: Who do you think is the greatest living president?
“Obviously the greatest president of my lifetime is Ronald Reagan,” said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.