Bushwhacked

A former governor said the following about the current state of the Republican party:

"Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation, finding some degree of common ground... [he] would have a hard time if you define the Republican party — and I don’t — as having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow for finding some common ground."

The person who said this was former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.  You would normally expect this kind of talk from Democrats -- certainly not from a Republican.  And the implicit idea in this statement that Mitt Romney is somehow to the right of Reagan is laughable.  As Troy Senik at Ricochet notes, this is surely an odd observation considering that

...our last presidential nominee was John McCain, the baton major in every bipartisan parade that marched through the United States Senate for a decade. And this time around it's Mitt Romney -- not exactly the second coming of Barry Goldwater.

Before McCain became the rigid ideologue and ultra-conservative Republican nominee in 2008, he was praised for his independence and willingness to go against the GOP on any number of issues, much to the delight of the MSM.  At the same time Democrats nominated Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore -- none of which I remember being lambasted by the media as being too rigid in adhering to their own principles.