No more Jeb to kick around.  Without waiting to find out whether he came in fourth or fifth place in the South Carolina Primary, the former president's brother, the former president's son, announced his withdrawal from the nomination quest.  I knew his campaign was finished last Fall when he got testy with a group of reporters asking him questions.  Trump can insult reporters to their faces; when Bush gets mad he seems like he's out of place, like William H. Macy's character in Fargo, trying to get away with the fake kidnapping of his wife.  Macy's character doesn't have the criminal mindset, he's basically just a dork car salesman uncomfortable inside the lie he's trying to live.  Bush, similarly, didn't have the go-for-the-throat skills of the natural sociopathic politician.  Trump, we've known since last year, does.
     A journalist on MSNBC this morning concluded that "Jeb is just too nice a guy."
     Mild-mannered Bush--a contrast with the older brother, who was vicious enough to approve torture.
     Speaking of torture, Kerry Sanders of MSNBC was in a Nevada restaurant this morning (preparatory to the Nevada Republican Caucus), talking with patrons, one of whom, a middle-aged woman, said that Trump's enthusiasm for the return of waterboarding of "terrorists" is a good idea.  Anything that helps protect "our soldiers," she said, "is a good thing."
     Sanders didn't ask the question I would've asked: "How does waterboarding protect American soldiers?"
     I suspect the answer would've been something like, "The terrorists will spill information that will help uncover terror plots."
     It's shaky ground, but Trump embraces the unsteadiness of the pro-torture argument, because, I think, it appeals to the sadistic, stupid, and disgusting instincts of his dumbest supporters--in other words, most of them.  Trump's proposals, given usually at his mob mentality rallies, never take into account how much law will have to be abolished, how much of the U.S. Constitution, will have to be rewritten; how difficult and time-consuming these legal matters are to carry out, and in the end, how often the final results don't conform to the original proposals.  Let's prevent every Muslim from coming to the United States.  Let's make Mexico pay for a nearly 2,000 mile-long wall.  Let's overturn the current laws against torturing people.  From a practical standpoint, these three notions alone are not just bad ideas.  They're megalomaniacal fantasies, bought into by about one out of three Republicans, enough of a minority to lead that party to the quashing of the influence of its more reasonable thinkers, and to the elevation of a strongman (in his own mind) who knows how to stir enthusiasm about himself, but doesn't know shit about the running of a powerful nation in a fast-changing world growing more confident in taking on first world countries.
     Dull Jeb Bush was one of those reasonable thinkers, like his ideas or not, ruined politically by the king of a media machine.  That king is going to win the nomination unless two much younger men, Cruz and Rubio, both horrible as presidential possibilities in their own ways, knock Trump down.
     My money's on Trump.  My head, and my heart, are appalled by the prospect of that motherfucker becoming president of the United States, but in these fear-driven times, characterized by random and purposeful violence, by economic mismanagement and environmental catastrophes manmade and otherwise, it seems likely my fellow Americans will, in November, make the stupidest mistake in this country's history.

                                                                              Vic Neptune