Jeb Bush Quits

The South Carolina GOP primary produced unsurprising results. Donald Trump won, and did so convincingly. Not clear to me who can stop him from gaining the Republican nomination. He's playing by the rules and winning; if that continues, he deserves the nomination. Not the candidate I would have wanted, but if he wins he wins, the game is the game: the winner gets the medal and the burden.

If Trump becomes the Republican nominee, can he beat one of the progressives socialists, hell, communists from the DNC? I don't know. The pundits and pollsters, repeatedly proven notoriously inaccurate, have come in all over the place. Worse, however, and so very frustrating for me, personally, is that I no longer can read the politics of my own country. Although having long railed against the universities, media, and Hollywood for undermining our nation and the West, I did not fully comprehend how far that has gone. It has gone so far, in fact, that an old communist crank such as Sanders gets taken seriously, with his only opponent within the Democratic Party an old, lying, crooked, crypto-communist gangster. Under those circumstances, I will take Trump over the offer from the new Communist Party, AKA Democratic Party, and find it appalling when friends say they will "never" vote for Trump, no matter what. That's their choice and right, of course, but a disaster for the nation. A third Obama term on steroids? No, thanks. I will take a chance on a brash real estate tycoon. Maybe he can save the West from itself.

That said, I wanted to write a few words about Jeb Bush's departure from the race.

He should have left some time ago. The nomination was not going to happen for him, something painfully obvious ALMOST from the start. I see Governor Bush as a smart and decent man, a patriot, and with a good understanding of foreign affairs. I don't think he would have proven a bad president. He, of course, found himself hindered by bearing the name of a major "establishment" family in the Year of the Outsider. His campaign relied on huge amounts of money to promote a tiny, muddled message. Bush couldn't decide whether to embrace or run away from the presidential records of his brother and his father; got himself into early trouble with odd reflections on the Iraq war; and failed to understand the strength and depth of the anti-government mood in the country. He, for example, pushed old-time federal government programs--e.g., Common Core--when, obviously, GOP voters did not want those. As we watch Europe undergo an unprecedented Muslim invasion, and experience a wave of illegal aliens sweeping across our own border, he got mired in the immigration debate, uttering tone-deaf pro-immigration slogans. He did not take a clear stand against importing potential Muslim terrorists into the USA, and refused to defend the second amendment, until too late. His campaign, simply put, came off as out of touch with the new reality.

As mentioned before, I spent the better part of a day some years ago with Governor Bush when he visited Indonesia with a delegation headed by the Secretary of the then-new Department of Homeland Security, Governor Ridge. I found Bush an avid listener, sharp questioner, and a decent person. He, for example, learned that an Embassy employee's elderly mother lived in Florida, did not feel well, and worried about her son's safety in Indonesia; he immediately offered to give the lady a call as soon as he got back home. He had a great sense of humor, "interrogating" me on my status as a Florida resident, trying to figure out what I knew about Florida sports (almost nothing) and ruling me, in the end, a Floridian Solely for Tax Purposes. He seemed somewhat "placated" when I offered up that I had voted for him.

A good guy, but . . . . it was just not his time to become President.