[NewRepublic] After writing a partial defense of Jeb Bush late last week, when critics were laying in to him for shrugging off mass killings, a number of readers wrote to remind me that Republicans had themed their presidential nominating convention in 2012 after a Barack Obama quote they’d intentionally ripped from context. If Republicans were willing to use the phrase “you didn’t build that” to weaken Obama, then turnabout’s fair play, and Democrats should weaken Bush by turning “stuff happens” into a rallying cry.
These readers were implicitly ceding the point that decontextualizing Bush’s response to the Oregon killings is a misleading and instrumentalist way to attack him. But even thinking in the most cynical terms, throwing “stuff happens” in Bush’s face to suggest he has no sympathy for victims of gun violence is a tactical error as well as an intellectual one.
And you know the left is all about intellectualism.
“Stuff happens,” Bush said. “There’s always a crisis. And the impulse is always to do something and it’s not always the right thing to do.” |