The fall of the House of Bush

It was a pitiful end to a would-be dynasty.  Jeb! was supposed to be this cycle's Romney -- the safe, sane option backed by the big money and the "right" people, who would glide to the Republican nomination more or less by default as the various nutballs imploded.  But this time the base demanded a nutball, and would settle for nothing less than The Donald.  Despite Jeb!'s Presidential demeanor.....

.....and the excitement evident at his campaign events.....

.....he just never got any traction in the polls.  Tens of millions in ad spending failed to win him any support or even to take down the upstart Rubio, something Chris Christie accomplished with a few sentences that instantly made "the Rubot" an unshakable meme.

In fairness, dynasties have never lasted long in the US.  Think how large the Kennedys once loomed in our politics -- but you don't hear much about them now.  And Jeb! chose to enter the Republican arena just as a full-blown pitchforks-and-torches peasant uprising was under way, complete with its ranting, glowering, oddly-orange Marat.  In the end he was just one more disconsolate and bewildered aristocrat hauled off by the tumbrels of dismal polling.

I picture his campaign as a hive of activity all going for naught because of failure to adapt to circumstances -- an army of workers and consultants frantically shoveling huge piles of money into toilets, while in back the leaders hunched around their plans, baffled at the Floridian upstart and especially the bloviating billionaire orangutan who had stolen the crown prince's rightful day in the sun, but gamely struggling on with more and more of the same old ads and clichés which, surely, would restore the divinely-appointed order.

But it's over now.  There's some talk of a further generation of Bushes being groomed from shrubhood for future Presidential runs, but it won't happen.  It's impossible to tell what the Republican party's future will look like in the wake of The Donald, or even whether it has one.  But nobody is going to believe that a Bush revival is the answer.  The dynasty is done.

Please clap.