GOP Listening Tour Gives Jeb Bush Some Answers: Who Needs High School or College When You Can Listen to Rush Limbaugh
By Heather Sunday May 03, 2009 11:00am
From the GOP's National Council for a New America town hall meeting with Jeb Bush, Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney. The questioner has obviously been listening to too much Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. He managed to cram in almost every right wing anti-Obama talking point that's out there in a matter of just a minute or so. He also apparently thinks that listening to right wing radio is a substitute for...going to school.
Q: I have another question on education and kind of to disagree with what you said Gov. Bush. I really think the past is important and I think we do emphasize science and math over liberal arts like history and I'm looking at Barack Obama who is basically the hippie flower child of Saul Alinsky who's a long dead hippie. And I guess like, yes math and science are important but what does it matter if you have highly productive people who, because they have no grasp of what's happened in the past, they're willing to let people who are going to create a marginal tax rate of 60 or 70%, I mean they're, is it surprising that Barack Obama was elected and he goes around apologizing in every country he goes to, when people are spoon fed years in high school and college of anti-American history? I mean quite honestly I think people learn more from listening to Rush Limbaugh's show than they do in high school and college. And do you have a response?
Bush: Well the context that I was talking about the past was really candidates running for office that have a kind of a nostalgic view of the world. That's a perilous thing and I think to President Obama, candidate Obama's credit he waged a 2008 campaign that was relevant for people's aspirations whether you agree with him or not. It was not a look back. It was a look forward and so our ideas need to be forward looking and relevant. I felt like there was a lot of nostalgia for the good old days in the messaging and, you know, it's great, it doesn't draw people towards your cause.
[....]
I do agree with you that just as it's important to have a civil debate, a dialog about issues, it's okay to talk about history as well and in fact if you haven't read the book about the times that are going on now the best book to read about what's happening now is probably The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes which describes how the government tried to deal with the Depression. And to get to this point of tinkering and challenging and changing and creating so much uncertainty that it created a void that only government could fill and the private sector froze in place and it prolonged the Depression. And I think there is a lesson in history in that regard.
I love how these history revisionists always want to have a "civil" debate about topics where they're just dead wrong.
