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Jeb Bush says his brother "kept us safe." He's wrong.

Laura Segall/Getty Images

Defending his brother's record as president at CNN's Republican presidential debate, Jeb Bush had a simple answer: "He kept us safe."

It's an answer Jeb has given before and that conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has cited as George W. Bush's main legacy.

But it's not true.

For one thing: The vast majority of people killed on American soil by terrorists throughout the entirety of American history were killed during George W. Bush's administration. It's not even close. And this was followed up by the deaths of an even larger number of Americans during Bush's invasion of Iraq.

It would be a bit of a stretch to say that the thousands of innocent Americans killed on 9/11 were Bush's fault, but it's certainly not to his credit that it happened during his administration, and it's mind-boggling that the Bush family thinks it deserves special credit for its success in keeping the country safe from terrorism when no other administration has presiding over an attack nearly that devastating.

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