Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush earned huge applause from the audience on Wednesday night during the GOP presidential debate after saying that his brother “kept us safe” while in office.
Real estate mogul Donald Trump took a shot at President George W. Bush’s administration, saying it opened the door for President Obama’s election. He said the Bush presidency was such a “disaster” that even Abraham Lincoln “couldn’t have been elected.”
Jeb Bush fired back, invoking the 9/11 terror attacks.
“You know what? As it relates to my brother, there is one thing I know for sure, he kept us safe,” Bush said, having to pause for one of the biggest rounds of applause from the audience of the night. “I don’t know if you remember, Donald. You remember the rubble? You remember the firefighter with his arms around it? He sent a clear signal that the United States would be strong and fight islamic terrorism and he did keep us safe.”
George W. Bush was President when about 3,000 Americans were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks. He also authorized the subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, during which more than 4,400 American lives and 115,000 Iraqi lives where lost.
Jeb has waded into George’s Iraq War record before, saying he would have invaded Iraq even given the intelligence we have now, before backtracking.
Watch the full exchange from the debate below:
All right, Jeb, you’ve covered your ass.
One of the many great things about Twitter is that quite a bit of the DC press corps caught that line and were pretty blown away by the insensitivity and ridiculousness of claiming such a thing when the anniversary of 9/11 was less than a week ago.
Yeah! The Drunken Frat Boy kept all of us safe…well, except for those 3,000+ folks who were murdered in the Towers or those 50,000+ troops whose lives he threw away in the wrong country for nothing,
Not from his own buffoonery —
I get so sick of that idea W “kept us safe”. Like Hell, the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history happened on his watch; he did not “keep us safe”, he botched the hand-off from the Clinton administration who tried very hard to warn him and get him up to speed fast, but W would not listen.