Jeb Bush, Pot-Smoking Bully!

The Boston Globe has a long article on Jeb Bush’s high school years at Andover. The Globe piece has been picked up by many other news outlets; the Hill’s headline is typical: “Jeb Bush was a pot-smoking bully, say former classmates.”

The Globe article is actually rather interesting. It is as much about Andover as Bush. Bush’s high school years were from 1967 to 1971, and most of what the Globe records of Andover–kids were smoking pot and protesting the war–could have been written about nearly any school.

It’s hard to make much of the marijuana smoking. The Democrats now consider pot to be a positive good, right? One thing missing from the Globe piece is whether Bush and his friends called themselves the “choom gang.”

What about the claim that Jeb was a bully? It is based on precisely two incidents. In one, Bush and some friends sewed another boy’s pajama bottoms shut. In the other, Bush lifted up another boy. That’s the “bullying” tally for his four years at Andover. Pathetic.

This is reminiscent, of course, of the Washington Post’s long story about Mitt Romney’s high school days, featuring a decades-ago incident where Romney and others cut another boy’s hair. It’s remarkable: just when you think investigative reporting is dead, another Republican presidential candidate comes along to get reporters’ juices flowing again. Think what doggedness it requires to go back forty-odd years to research a politician’s high school days!

Of course, no such energy is expended on researching the pasts of Democratic candidates. Forget about high school; we still don’t know anything about Barack Obama’s college or law school records, which apparently are treated as state secrets. Why? My guess is that he applied to college and/or law school as a foreign student from Kenya and secured preferential treatment or scholarship assistance on that basis. We know that he represented himself as a Kenyan for something like 20 years, even though he wasn’t. Also, why wouldn’t Obama release any of his medical records? (He had a doctor write a one-page letter instead.) He is a relatively young and apparently healthy man. What’s the problem? Is there something in his medical history that he didn’t want voters to know about? And if that is the case, isn’t it a little more significant than lifting up another kid as a teenager?

As for Hillary Clinton, the press is still covering up for her. No need to go back to high school–how about her tenure as Secretary of State? The Libyan adventure was a disaster that appears to be leading to another failed, terrorist-dominated state. Benghazi, bad as it was, is only a part of that story. And how about Elizabeth Warren? For reasons that I find mystifying, she is taken seriously as a presidential candidate. She has run in only one election, and hasn’t been vetted at all. The only thing we know about her, other than the fact that she is a leftist, is that she advanced herself in academia by falsely claiming to be an Indian. (A nice parallel there with Obama’s fictitious Kenyan origins.) Do you think that at this moment, newspaper reporters are hunting down Warren’s high school classmates, looking for negative quotes or discreditable incidents? No, I don’t think so either.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses