Five Quick Things: A Bush Family Comeback? Not No. Hell No! thumbnail

Five Quick Things: A Bush Family Comeback? Not No. Hell No!

I’m not going to do so well with the “Q” part of the 5QT on my first item. The rest, though? Like lightning.

I’m trying to do better, because I know you’re as ready for the weekend as I am.

1. Stay Out of the Bushes

It’s probably just a clickbait piece Breitbart ran on Thursday — hell, I won’t deny the clickbait-y quality of sharing it — about a purported re-entry of the retrograde Bush faction into Republican politics. That doesn’t invalidate the need to remain vigilant against this horror resurfacing.

Former President George W. Bush and his family are reportedly planning to retake the Republican Party from President Donald Trump once he is out of office, according to a recent report.

There are allegedly “rumors” stirring that there is a “plot to end the so-called ‘Bush Exile’” as part of an effort to take control of the GOP from Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) policies, according to the Daily Mail:

Now, rumors are stirring of a plot to end the so-called ‘Bush Exile’ and take back the GOP from the so-called scourge of Trumpism.

Behind the scenes, and still with deep connections around the country, a shadow Republican Party is lying in wait to take over when Trump is gone.

And, while the former president is determined not to publicly criticize Trump — much to the frustration of some of his former aides — he may not be averse to quietly helping to shape the Republican Party’s long-term future.

One person, who is described as a “former Bush official,” told the outlet that Trump “knows that there’s no third term option,” while admitting that Vice President JD Vance “has a head start” over other possible Republican presidential candidates in 2028.

The former Bush official also predicted that “there will be a big open field within the Republican Party” for the 2028 presidential race, according to the outlet.

Former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Michael Steele has also been reported as pleading for the former president to get involved in the party, stating that he has “a voice that would resonate with a lot more Americans,” according to the outlet.

This column has covered the subject of Bush Republicanism repeatedly, including in a fairly widely-read piece over the weekend. There is no question the Bush faction — whether it’s actual Bushes, in which case it’s somewhat confusing as to who their candidate might be, or simply the corporatist Washington Generals crowd the Bushes championed — is plotting to restore itself atop the GOP’s power structure after having been dethroned by Trump’s MAGA takeover. (RELATED: Bush Republicanism Can’t Win the Votes We Need to Save America)

And so much of this Nick Fuentes/Tucker Carlson imbroglio, which continues to be fanned by a lot of the same people, is a proxy fight by the Bush crowd against Vance as the frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. (RELATED: The Curious Candidacy of JD Vance)

If you want to boil this down, just recall the idiocy of the Lincoln Project over the past few years. I don’t know that we’ll see those troglodytes making a comeback in advance of 2028, but the formula — left-wing corporate dollars flowing in behind legacy establishment political consultants (who utterly suck at their jobs, by the way) for the purpose of causing chaos inside the Republican tent and attempting to make MAGA toxic on the Right — is certainly not going away. (RELATED: A Washington Establishment Letter Targets Trump)

All manner of horrors are coming. There is no denying we’re going to see the former empire striking back.

It should be noted, though, that Bush Republicanism was an adulterated and weak-sauce corruption of Buckleyite conservatism — something that was built, politically speaking, to contend with New Deal liberalism. Bush Republicanism fell apart not just under its own weight, which was considerable, but also because it was utterly ineffective against Obamunism. Genteel politics in the face of not an opponent but an enemy that is happy to incarcerate, impoverish, and ruin its detractors in every possible way will fare about as well as the Polish horse cavalry against the Nazi blitzkrieg.

This effort is doomed. It would be nice if they didn’t make it.

2. Temu Obama Swings… and Misses… and Gets a Bat to the Head for His Trouble

Hakeem Jeffries really shouldn’t have been out front on the Jeffrey Epstein stuff. The Democrats shouldn’t, to be sure, but Jeffries, whose campaign fundraisers shook Epstein for campaign donations like he was a pecan tree, was especially ill-advised to try to pin the Epstein scandal on Donald Trump in front of all the cameras.

Two things went very badly for him as a result.

The first was this…

And then came this…

Le ouch.

Then he careened into this, in response to Trump’s characterization of that video, the Seditious Six cut this week as sedition…

And the internet has weighed in with this…

A prediction: it might take another couple of years, but Temu Obama is going to come to grief and they’re going to dump him as their leader in the House. I don’t know who’ll take him out or if he’ll just take himself out, but some sort of way this will end. (RELATED: ‘Don’t Give Up The Ship’? Seriously?)

3. The Sharia Ban Bill Needs to Come Soon, and Our National Discussion Needs to Come With It

Islam isn’t compatible with Western civilization. The Europeans are proving that. We already know what’s coming.

This is coming.

And that video is from earlier this year, BEFORE Zohran Mamdani won the mayoral election.

And this is already here.

Banning sharia law is something lots of states have been working on. Sen. Tommy Tuberville introduced a federal ban on sharia in the Senate last month. This needs to move, now.

4. Is This Something?

At the Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil had an interesting story about a TV series that will hit in a couple of months. Here’s the trailer…

The Daily Wire’s efforts to become a movie/TV studio have been interesting to follow. There’s a bit of a herky-jerky quality to their offerings — Matt Walsh’s documentaries have been pretty sizable hits, Ladyballers was fun, if not groundbreaking, Run Hide Fight was pretty interesting, and significant if for nothing other than it helped to launch Isabel May into the cultural bloodstream.

But there hasn’t been a true tentpole yet, and there isn’t a steady stream of productions coming out of that conservative media outlet. It’s sort of a catch-22 — you’re trying to launch yourself as a streaming service, essentially, where you’re running a bunch of podcasts and news programming to go with your creative cultural products, and to generate the revenue to finance the features you need to sell millions of subscriptions. But to sell millions of subscriptions, you need a steady stream of high-quality content.

My sense is that the Daily Wire is in the same no-man’s-land as a few other conservative media companies trying to break through. I just wish I could stream DW’s platform to my TV without an incredibly cumbersome process of accessing the internet and attempting to sign in with the remote control, which was the state of things when I last gave up trying.

Who knows? Maybe this, which interestingly reimagines Merlin of the King Arthur legend as a Christian, rather than pagan, character, could be the item that truly launches the Daily Wire into the movie and TV business.

5. This Won’t Do at All

You’ve probably heard about the latest public transportation horror, this one in Chicago…

It’s bad. It’s really, really bad.

In the initial reporting, we believed Reed had 22 prior arrests. That’s inexcusable enough, but it turns out Reed had 49 prior arrests, including for arson, as well as ten felony convictions. And it seems Reed’s victim didn’t get into an argument with him at all. Reed just approached her, doused her with a flammable liquid, and set her on fire.

I don’t have a solution for this. I know what’s inevitable if it isn’t fixed, which is that the victims of this kind of barbarity are going to stop depending on the government to protect them and start arming up and creating militias. I’m actually amazed it hasn’t happened. But it’s coming, and when it does, the cities will descend into Mad Max-style chaos.

This is what you have when the people in charge refuse to do their jobs. This is Brandon Johnson’s fault, plain and simple.

READ MORE from Scott McKay:

‘Don’t Give Up The Ship’? Seriously?

The SNAP Reset, Too Long in Coming, Is a Happy Accident of the Schumer Shutdown

Bush Republicanism Can’t Win the Votes We Need to Save America

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