Had Enough Schadenfreude? Bye Bye Jeb.

I don't have any animus for Jeb or his family but I don't have any philosophical, intellectual, emotional or other connection with the guy either. Despite the ongoing character assassinations, the Bushes are incredibly decent people. But who is Jeb and what does he stand for?

Whereas I have some sympathy for Jeb and his relatives I have zero compassion for the consultants and donors who burned $150 MILLION! for this fiasco of a campaign. Actually, I have contempt for Jeb's inner circle. A country desperately cries out for help and they give us a candidate who doesn't want to discuss issues and viciously attacks candidates who do. The petty attacks on Marco Rubio and his possibly imprudent boat purchase leveled by the proxies of a silver spoon baby would set the tone for Jeb's misguided campaign.

Politico had a revealing article on this belly flop but being a crypto-leftist data rag, they had to take a swipe at the Donald.

The entire premise of Bush’s candidacy now looks like a misread of an electorate that wasn’t amenable to establishment candidates—and a misunderstanding of a modern media environment ill-suited to a policy wonk who speaks in paragraphs, not punchy sound bites. He couldn’t sell experience to an electorate that wanted emotion.

I submit that Trump has succeeded not by talking in sound bites but by talking about matters no one else wanted to discuss. But I digress.

In 2009 Rush Limbaugh had appeared at CPAC and spoke for about an hour without a note or teleprompter or any other assistance and brought the house down. Standing ovation after standing ovation until no one sat down. At about the same time Jeb Bush was buying pizzas for GOP focus groups so he could listen to what was on Republicans' minds. An off-air listener on Limbaugh's show mentioned Jeb and voiced frustration at just how out of touch Jeb happened to be. The listener mentioned Sarah Palin's stump speeches and Limbaugh's CPAC performance and Jeb finds the discontent so mysterious that he has to perform a market analysis in an effort to understand it.

Jeb spent a lot of time on the sidelines. I don't remember him giving so much as a shout out to the Tea Party. If he wasn't ready to run against Obama in 2012, he could have run against--and probably defeated--Bill Nelson in an effort to help his party win back the Senate. Not Jeb. I don't recall his denouncing Lois Lerner, Jonathan Gruber, the Obama Administration's myriad abuses of power, budget excesses or anything else. Nope. Just stay in that holding pattern till we can roll you out on the campaign trail.

"What is it about Americans and their obsession with lists?" (If not a verbatim quote, pretty close to it) the British import, Dr. O'Hara, asks aloud in an episode of "Nurse Jackie." I don't know but we do like them. The biggest NBA draft flops, the biggest box office failures, the worst automobiles in history. Someday, some waste of a time portal might offer a slide show of the grossest failing political campaigns in US History. For now, Jeb Bush 2016 is in a class by itself.