Should be an easy answer, Jeb

Was invading Iraq a good idea? If somebody takes more than two seconds to answer with a simple uppercase "NO," you have to wonder about their grasp of reality. You really have to wonder if that person should run for president.

But there's Jeb Bush, parsing and equivocating and trying to make it sound like supporting one's troubled brother matters more than correctly identifying the nation's biggest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam. 

I don't get this. Jeb Bush seemed to be the only GOP presidential candidate who had not arrived by clown car, the only one even remotely electable, and yet he refuses to acknowledge the obvious: We screwed up big time. (Well, not "we," per se, but it does involve a W.) It's a mistake that keeps on corroding the country in myriad ways. 

I don't know; maybe it just hasn't hurt the Bush family personally.

Jeb says the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. Maybe so, if some Jeffersonian figure had risen in Saddam's place. Instead we've got ISIS, the murderous loons who make Saddam look like Mahatma Ghandi. We've got many thousands maimed and dead, many billions wasted, and the Middle East is arguably a much worse shithole than when we started.

We don't set the bar very high for presidential candidates: just show up in a suit and refrain from major felonies. But people who drone on about the future should display a passing familiarity with the past.