Here's what's bothering me.

George Bush, Sr., was sent over to Newsweek recently to once again tell the tale of JEB!'s disinterest in running for President in 2008. This has been an ongoing talking point for the Bushes, both before and after JEB!'s assignment to south Asia to tour the tsunami ruins.

But I've been reading Fear and Loathing... '72 lately, and Thompson spends a lot of his primary coverage discussing the looming juggernaut of Ted Kennedy making a late entry into the race. The conventional wisdom is that Kennedy was only interested in running if the rest of the field looked weak and if somebody else (ie. John Lindsay) built up a constituency he could poach.

Back in 1972, the primary season didn't begin until March, and the prelude campaign was much shorter than what we have now, so it wasn't too outlandish to think that a well-known politician might wait until late April to enter the race (it's also worth noting that conventions were less scripted then, and it would've been possible for Kennedy to have emerged there as a consensus candidate).

I think there's a roughly even chance that this is the sort of thing JEB! is planning. The names being proposed for the 2008 GOP field are extremely uninspiring. Bill Frist, the "presumptive frontrunner," is one boring, cat-killing motherfucker; he is saddled with a near-total lack of personality and a lengthy record as a Senator. Condi Rice is incompetent and a known liar; normally that would be just fine for Republican primary voters, but in this case, she's also a black woman. John McCain will be opposed by the entirety of the party machine; he'll also be really old and still just as creepy as he was in 2000. Rick Santorum has only a smooth bump between his legs and a piece of molded brown plastic on top of his head; he's also pathologically obsessed with people fucking dogs.

Meanwhile, the Democrats will likely have two bonafide political rockstars running in Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. The media will have stopped paying much attention to JEB! by October, 2007, when he still will not have entered the race, leaving the lion's share of the attention to go Clinton's way. I tend to doubt she will win the nomination, but I suspect she'll have some relatively strong showings and will continue to be a major presence in the race into late February and March.

Then, with the Republican field looking like a bit of a sideshow, JEB! will burst onto the scene to rescue his party. He will have escaped a good six months of national scrutiny. He will not have had to spend any money at all on the first half dozen or so primaries. He will be able to attract true independents by declaring that the party machinery was failing to do what was necessary to connect with the American people. He announces just in time to get on most of the Super Tuesday ballots, and staging write-in campaigns in the states where he's missed the deadline. He sweeps the rest of the contests, picks up more delegates when Frist drops out, wins the nomination on the first ballot, then kills and eats John McCain to cap his acceptance speech.

If there are two things I believe about these Bushes, they're that they are congenital liars and power-fiends. Given that the private sector has been somewhat hostile to his generation of Bushes, I don't think there's a chance that JEB! will simply walk off into the sunset of CEOness after leaving the Governor's mansion.