It takes a certain disposition to be a successful president: calculated, but decisive; actionable, but pensive; passionate, yet removed. The decisions you make in the Oval Office have the ability to affect not just the country whose 350 million citizens you are ultimately responsible for, but that of the future of the entire world. It’s a genuine burden that I don’t think many of us are capable of handling.
Jeb Bush thinks he is, and alongside that, he wants you to know he’d be a real leader. The kind who when presented with an absurd hypothetical that has absolutely no bearing on reality enthusiastically gets behind the stupidest course of action.
That being: Answering the dumb fucking question.
A reporter posed to Bush the hypothetical that made the rounds on the internet two weeks ago: If you could travel back in time to kill baby Hitler, would you?
The question is simplistic on its surface, a utilitarian hypothetical that posits that clearly one person’s life is worthless when compared to the pain and suffering of the countless millions who endured World War II.
Which is why most people enthusiastically answer yes.
But there are deeper implications. The ethics of child murder, for one. The argument of nature vs. nurture. It really boils down to free will, whether that exists, and if the machinations that were in place well before Hitler’s birth — namely, the forces of colonialism, German unification, and centuries upon centuries of conflict on the European mainland — were enough to bring the world’s biggest countries into a global conflict with or without the aid of one singular man.
This is not to even mention the simple fact that fucking with the spacetime continuum could create catastrophes beyond which our simplistic minds cannot begin to comprehend. Two baby Hitlers, perhaps.
“Hell, yes,” said Jeb Bush.
He then tweeted: “You got to.”
You got to.
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