On Sunday, Flag Day, Jeb Bush announced his candidacy.  The fake ignorance professed by Florida's former governor has ended.  He's running.  His official sign says so: Jeb!
     The sign's purpose points to Jeb Bush's reluctance to be identified with his older brother and father.  Bush '16, as a sign, would remind voters of the blood link between fresh Jeb and that's-so-eighties-and-nineties George Bush and that's-so-Iraq-War George Bush.  Jeb, if he gets elected, may continue in the family tradition and bomb the Middle East, but if he does, he will carry on with Obama's war policies.  The exclamation point after Jeb could represent the point of an explosion's impact and the rising dust cloud.
     His defenders have rushed to explain that Jeb! harkens back to the 1990s, when John E. Bush ran for the governor's mansion in Florida.  It's plausible, I guess, if you want to ignore Jeb's brother's record and the impact it now has on Republican minds.  They're acutely aware of how fucked up Iraq is.  They blame Obama's withdrawal of most U.S. troops a few years ago, leaving a vacuum where competence supposedly ruled.  Obama himself must've been affected by Iraq's example when he postponed the originally proposed troop withdrawal date from Afghanistan.  Now, though, most Republicans don't look upon the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ordered by Jeb's brother, as having been a good idea.  Yet, many of these same politicians and right wing thinkers don't want to make the connection between the U.S. failure of the Iraq War and the rise of ISIS.  Instead, they insist "we won the Iraq War."  Like we won in Vietnam.
     Considering that Jeb, exclamation point or not, has foreign policy advisors, like Iraq War hard-on Paul Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives who convinced themselves taking and holding Iraq would be easy, it's likely the candidate believes in military interventions.  Such enterprises, of course, are profitable for the arms industry.  All out war with ISIS, and whatever comes after them, can keep the war machine bonfire going until Jeb is done abusing the world, followed by the next asshole, and so on. 
     Jeb! reminds me of what I would say if he were running away from me: "Jeb!  Come back here!"
     Or, if I haven't seen him for a long time: "Jeb!  How ya doin?"
     Or, it simply means he's the next punch in the face masquerading as a peace-bringer to the Middle East.
     The day after Jeb announced his big deal in Miami, Donald Trump spoke before a crowd of "thousands," by his own estimate, in Trump Tower in Manhattan.  More reliable estimates put the audience at about 300, many of them, as revealed by some honest to God investigative journalism by The Hollywood Reporter, extras hired from a casting agency by the Trump Campaign.  They were paid fifty bucks apiece to cheer for Donald.  It's like a man paying people to pretend they're his friends.  Is that sad?  In Donald Trump's case it's certainly funny. 
     His extemporaneous speech amounted to an unfiltered spewing of shouted words, claims, exaggerations, accusations, boasts.  He announced proudly his net worth: 8.7 billion dollars.  He claims he will self-finance his campaign, which, if he does, negates my idea of him requiring multi-billionaires to back him (as written about in my June 7, 2015 entry).  Forbes magazine counterclaims that Trump's true net worth is 4.1 billion dollars.  If so, as shown with his psychological need to bribe "supporters" to cheer him, Trump must've felt the need to double the figure, adding a few hundred million--not too much to seem implausible.
     Implausibility suffuses the possibility that a psychopathic egotist could become President of the United States.  Still, some cable news pundits point out that Trump says "what people in bars say."  Ordinary Americans, in other words.  They speak their minds, not barring their language with political correctness.  Trump, then, is the voice of common men and women. 
     In bars I've heard a variety of talk: intelligent, boring, stupid, incomprehensible.  Trump's views, though not incomprehensible, tend to be simple-minded, like his "solution" for defeating ISIS: smash them, Hulk not like them, Hulk destroy.
     As a genuine presidential candidate Trump appeals to idiots--he has their vote wrapped up.  For Trump, the world isn't complex.  In dealing with other nations he believes in pushing in and being unavoidable, making him thoroughly America First in his thinking.  Even so, he says, "America is a hellhole," a "third world nation."  During his June 15 speech, he lamented America's lack of military ambition, citing admirably the People's Republic of China:
     "They're building a military platform in the South China Sea!  Can we do that?  No, we can't!"
     Does he realize an unmoving sitting duck of an installation is hardly necessary if another nation has these things called aircraft carriers?
     For those who don't think beyond the thin first surface of reaction, an idiot-user like Donald Trump might seem like fresh air.  Indeed, his "honesty" strikes some as an antidote to the tortured phrases of Jeb Bush, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton trying to answer simple questions.  Trump, then, will be the chief entertainer in Race To The White House 2015, and, if he gets renewed, 2016.  As such, he will distract the news media from serious issues.  All he has to do is speak typical Trump and news networks will cover him and discuss his blather.  Herman Cain, pizza czar and, for a time, frontrunner among Republican presidential candidates in 2012, was a joke less obvious than Trump.  When asked anything about the state of the economy, Cain would reply, "Nine nine nine," referring to some never revealed super-plan to save America, and also sounding like the German word for "no." 
     Where Herman Cain was Dada, Donald Trump is Surrealist.  With the orange hair drooping all over his head and his too-small-for-his-face mouth he resembles an orangutan's ass.  The capitalist orangutan lopes about, its Donald-behind shitting on everything and everyone, paying special attention to journalists who must cover him in this infotainment age, because they're trapped in his jungle.  An ideal blending has occurred: corporate-owned news networks and the corporation that is Trump.  Everybody's fucking each other.  Ratings and making shitloads of money is all that matters to these people.  Hence, the 2016 presidential year will show, finally, next November, who, our next president, will have been willing to eat the most shit.
     Jeb!
     Donald$
     Hillary...
     Bernie?

                                                                        Vic Neptune