Jeb Bush And The Myth Of The "Moderate Republican"

Catherine Rampell reviews some of the seminal "thinking" of purported compassionate, "moderate Republican" John Ellis "J.E.B." Bush, as revealed in his 1994 book, "Profiles in Character:"

Bush also pines for the days of “pillories and public dunkings,” and regrets that “much of today’s criminal justice system seems to be lacking in humiliation.” He endorses one idea, proposed by a Miami Herald columnist, that juvenile offenders should be shamed by dressing them “in frilly pink jumpsuits and making them sweep the streets of their own neighborhoods.” This sounds a lot like the infamous pink underwear inmates wear in Arizona’s Maricopa County, but apparently even that would be insufficiently emasculating.

Perhaps most astonishingly, Bush advocates using corporal punishment in public schools, because he says the humiliation involved (rather than the physical pain) is so effective.  [snip]

Bush has some other strange and/or relatively retrograde things in the text, including some histrionics about the rise of no-fault divorce (as well as “no-fault psychotherapy”) and fierce objections to the fact that a criminal defendant’s childhood and life circumstances are ever taken into consideration before passing judgment.  [snip]

But even if Bush no longer directly embraces, say, corporal punishment, his underlying philosophy is clear, and it’s consistent with attitudes we’ve seen among conservatives now in power in places such as Kansas and Wisconsin: that the main reason people are broke, unmarried, in prison or unemployed is because it’s all just too much gosh-darn fun.

Prescriptions for the moral instruction and betterment of society whether by the likes of trust-fund heirs like "J.E.B." or by the likes of erstwhile "populists" like Mike "Huckster" Huckabee and Scott "Koch Head" Walker, all amount to the same thing:  privileged =cough= white =cough= authoritarians want to maintain their increasingly shaky grip on power by being "tough" with "those people" that aren't their moral, financial or societal "equals."  It goes hand in hand with Republican efforts to strip voting rights from "those people," fight marriage equality, curtail a woman's reproductive rights, fight immigration reform, and stick it to the poor while lavishing tax benefits on the rich.  Let's bury this myth of "moderate Republicans" once and for all, please.

BONUS:  Of course, it's not just Jebbie that has pinched views.