Last Saturday, former President George W. Bush attended a fundraising event for the presidential campaign of his brother, Jeb Bush, at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. At this meeting, former President Bush delivered a series of harsh criticisms of his successor Barack Obama’s record in the Middle East. Wealthy donors from the Republican Jewish Coalition listened eagerly as Bush listed what he viewed as Obama’s mistakes and implied his brother would do a much better job, if he were to be elected president.

Bush saw many problems with the way that President Obama has handled foreign policy issues in the Middle East. He began by talking about how Obama has placed the US in “retreat” around the world by relaxing sanctions on Iran. Bush believes that Tehran has pulled the wool over Washington’s eyes, and that they still intend to build nuclear weapons. He said that lifting the sanctions on Iran will have a negative long term effect on US national security: “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the deal.”

Bush then launched into a long rant criticizing Obama’s handling of the ISIS situation in Iraq and Syria. He believes that Obama’s decision to withdraw all US troops from Iraq at the end of 2011 was a “strategic blunder.” He also criticized Obama’s follow-through on his promise to degrade and destroy ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria, saying that the president did not have an adequate strategy for dealing with the ISIS threat. He implied that Obama was not adaptable enough, and compared his failure with ISIS to the success of the troop surge in Iraq in 2007 by saying, “When the plan wasn’t working in Iraq, we changed.”

Bush’s comments in Las Vegas demonstrate how little respect he has for President Obama, but they also reveal the delusion at the heart of Demo-Republican politics. Many of Bush’s criticisms of Obama are valid – he is perhaps being too soft on Iran, and he has failed to have any significant impact on the ability of ISIS to wage terror throughout the Middle East. However, these criticisms could equally be applied to George W. Bush’s own presidency!

George W. Bush was responsible for the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq. He started two wars that cost the lives of thousands of American troops, while tens of thousands came home damaged in body or in mind. There was no strategy for winning these wars or accomplishing their objectives, and Obama’s bungling of these situations was just a continuation of what Bush had been doing. The troop withdrawal in 2011 that Bush complained about in his rant was actually done according to an agreement that Bush himself signed! Obama was merely following the terms that his predecessor had agreed to.

This is not to excuse either Barack Obama or George W. Bush. However, the Demo-Republican system has no interest in the truth, in solving problems, or in actually taking responsibility for anything. Both the Democrats and the Republicans benefit from this system of name-calling and responsibility dodging, and the supporters of both parties eat up these ridiculous claims. At this point, most Americans who follow politics are more like sports fans than reasonable participants in a democratic society – they blindly support their party and belittle members of the other party, while both parties rake in their profits as they take turns holding power.

We need to put an end to this Demo-Republican system. We need a leader from outside either of the main parties who will have the courage and know-how to step up and actually solve our problems, instead of simply passing the responsibility on to the next guy. If you believe that America can do better than these Demo-Republican clowns, I urge you to vote for me, Art Drew in the 2016 presidential election.