We're Not Intimidated By Thugs

There are two reasons I wouldn't consider voting for Jeb Bush. The first is because I'm only about 10% convinced he's not made of PVC pipe and old plush sofa cushions wrapped in a power-suit cover. The other reason is that he's always going to be beholden to the legacies of his familial predecessors in the White House, but less the uninspired patrician dullness of his dad and more the delicacy plate of bugs, glass and poison of his big brother.

The second problem paid off way faster than even I would have predicted, 18 months before the general election. I guess it's a sign of the relative sanity among both the electorate and the punditariat in 2015 when a defense of the GW Bush nation-building neocon fever dream is publicly untenable and must be immediately walked back. It's a little scary because Jeb was supposed to be the smart one, but early days, it's starting to look like maybe he was being graded on a sliding scale because Florida.

On the other end of the political scale, everybody at the Whole Foods is super-duper excited by the arrival of Bernie Sanders. Sanders has been a known name on a national level for my entire life, which is saying something for a politician from Vermont, competing for face-time in a congressional delegation that includes the world's most powerful comic book dork.

Just to be clear, there's zero chance Bernie Sanders is going to be president. What he's there to do is occupy the nationally unelectable space on the left that Hillary Clinton would like to spend as little time in as possible during the primary process. And what better way to inoculate yourself against the tiresome but all-too-predictable charge of crypto-socialism levied (in all volumes from side-eye to a banshee wail) against everyone who won't agree to re-name a state after Ronald Reagan. I mean, he really is a socialist. Go ahead, ask him, he'll even say it. The disappointed Elizabeth Warren people on the left can work out their Hillary skepticism before capitulating to the billion-dollar Clinton cash-valanche. We'll want to make sure everyone knows how much a significant minority of us really do give a shit about social programs and global warming before we try really, really hard in the fall to elect the Democrat corporations prefer.

It's not nearly late enough in the process for me to be happy or sad about any of this. At this point, I have the best of all possibilities open to me: total disinterest or schadenfreude. I can either forget it's all happening or poke my head in to watch the theater of earnest self-immolation when the good people at Yahoo! News are kind enough to compile the highlights into convenient clips under slightly misleading clickbait-y headlines. The rest of my time I can spend on important things, like watching movies about third-tier superheroes who can control bugs with their brains.