Lefty media (both overt and covert), which has been back on its heels lately thanks to Hillary’s impending arrest and prosecution, is already buzzing about the line quoted above, uttered today by Bush in Iowa. Skip to 9:40 of the clip below for the question and his answer in full. On the one hand, I’m reluctant to clobber a guy for a poorly worded soundbite when, as here, it’s in service to a sound point, that Obama and Hillary wasted the security improvements in Iraq circa 2009 by bringing everyone home and then standing around while Maliki fostered sectarian war. On the other hand, Democrats are going to clobber him with it so why shouldn’t we have at it now, when it’s still politically safe on the right to say “this is a tin-eared, frankly odd way to describe the state of Iraq for most of Dubya’s presidency”? (Once he’s the nominee and partisan battle lines are fixed, it’ll be partisan treason to acknowledge that this was a stupid thing to say.) Naval War College prof Tom Nichols:

@sidelineredwine That comment is utterly tone-deaf to the cost, the human misery of war, and the mistakes involved. @allahpundit

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) August 13, 2015

Right, and what makes it doubly weird, of course, is that Jeb already had a week’s worth of grief over his statements on Iraq earlier in the campaign when he hemmed and hawed over whether invading would have been the right choice knowing then what we know now. You’d think he’d be extra cautious about his pronouncements on that subject going forward given the unique liability he has from it. Instead he sounds glib. I saw one Jeb fan suggest on Twitter that this is no different really from Obama saying that it’s a good thing Saddam is no longer in power, but that’s night and day. Obama made his reputation as an anti-war candidate; he promised to bring the troops home and he did, to Iraq’s ruin. His nuclear deal with Iran is really just his way of relitigating the Iraq war, to see what would have happened if we’d pursued diplomacy at all costs with a regional menace instead of war to try to eliminate their WMD program. No one hears Obama praising Saddam’s demise and thinks “this guy’s ready to go on regime-change rampage across the region.” Some will think that of Jeb by dint of his last name, which, I assume, is why he chose to tackle Iraq this week as one of his first major foreign-policy speeches. He’s going on offense because he knows the other side has tons of ammo to use against him. And yet here we are, pondering some new ammo in the form of an off-the-cuff quote about “a good deal.”

Byron York makes another good point on Jeb’s remarks today. It’s fine to praise the surge as a rejoinder to his brother’s critics and as a way of putting Democrats on defense — “the surge accomplished the mission and then Obama came in and screwed it up” — but that’s not an argument that’s likely to stick with swing voters. York employs analogy:

Yes, the surge was a great success. But no matter how much they want to celebrate it, Republicans have learned: You don’t score a lot of points for fixing something you messed up in the first place.

The doctor who saves a patient through heroic means after nearly causing his death through a horrific mistake is unlikely to receive praise and acclaim for saving the patient’s life. That’s especially true if the patient will require years of care to recover from the incident.

To press the analogy a bit, say another doctor comes in and decides that long-term care is no longer necessary. He stops it, and the patient again sinks into crisis. Who is to blame then? Most people would probably say both, but the second doctor’s error is in failing to deal with the damage done by the first doctor. The bottom line is that “IRAQ? BLAME THE DEMOCRATS” won’t work.

There’s no way Bush is going to talk himself out of an Iraq problem with voters. If you nominate him, you accept that and hope for the best. The only thing that might mitigate his political damage from the war is if Obama’s foreign policy continues to collapse, including/especially if Iran ends up cheating on the nuclear deal. If that happens, swing voters will conclude that the war’s most famous critic was just as incompetent in his own way as his predecessor in office was, which will gain Jeb a new hearing on who’s really to blame for the state of Iraq and ISIS. Until then, though, he’s destined to lose this particular fight to Democrats on points. It’d be nice if he didn’t make it worse by occasionally punching himself in the face.