Gail Collins, "Wow, Jeb Bush Is Awful": And What About Hillary?

I don't disguise my disgust when contemplating a 2016 presidential race pitting Jeb Bush against Hillary Clinton. Sure, David Brooks recently told us:

"[W]e should be grateful that in each field of endeavor there are certain families that are breeding grounds for achievement. We should be grateful that there are Bachs in music, Griffeys and Molinas in baseball, Brontes and Amises in novel writing and Kennedys, Roosevelts, Clintons and Bushes in politics. These families make life more unfair for the rest of us (because it’s harder for others to compete against them), but they also make society as a whole more accomplished."

However, I would like to believe that there is no small difference between politics, which hones dishonesty and the unbridled pursuit of self-interest, and music, sports and writing. Yes, I know: The integrity of sports has suffered of late as a consequence of Deflategate, but I digress.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Wow, Jeb Bush Is Awful," Gail Collins would have us know:

"As a presidential hopeful, Bush’s most attractive feature was an aura of competence. Extremely boring competence, perhaps. Still, an apparent ability to get through the day without demonstrating truly scary ineptitude.

. . . .

Then, on Monday, Fox News aired an interview in which host Megyn Kelly asked Jeb whether 'knowing what we know now' he would have authorized the invasion of Iraq.

'I would have, and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody,' Bush replied.

Now no one, including Hillary Clinton’s worst enemy in the entire world, thinks that if she could go back in time to 2002, knowing that the invasion of Iraq was going to be a total disaster and that she would lose the presidential nomination in 2008 to a guy who ran on that very issue, she would still have voted to authorize the use of force."

Sorry, Gail, but none of us know what Hillary thinks or would have done, given her campaign of silence. We do know a bit about her behavior on the night of the Benghazi debacle, her erasure of tens of thousands of emails, and her refusal to answer questions involving the Uranium One imbroglio. Beyond that? Nothing.

Jeb is awful, but Hillary is not? Get real!