Jeb Bush’s witless attack on Matt Damon
Matt Damon in 2011
Put this in the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category: Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and national school reform leader, used Twitter to attack Matt Damon, the actor, for doing something that Bush himself had done.
Both Bush and Damon have been in the news, but (until this) for somewhat different reasons. Bush has been dealing with the serious fallout from the spectacular and embarrassing downfall last week of his protege, Tony Bennett, as Florida’s education commissioner last week (more on that below). Damon has been publicizing his newly released movie, “Elysium.”
So how did it happen that Bush went after Damon? Bush’s weak punch came in the form of this tweet:
Here’s the background:
Damon opposes the corporate-influenced brand of school reform that Bush pioneered when he was governor of Florida, from 1999-2007. He doesn’t run around talking about it all the time, but he did appear in 2011 at a rally in Washington D.C., where he discussed his own public school education in which teachers and students had the