Presidential elections should be limited to as short a time period as possible and are generally the biggest drain and distraction going. I have two excuses for looking into Jeb Bush. One is that I've been collecting the evidence that Hillary cannot be a lesser evil than any living human, and campaigning for No More Bushes or Clintons. The other is that I only read Jeb Bush: Outed because I've long liked the author, Stephen Goldstein.

People such as Molly Ivins and James Moore gave the U.S. lots of warning, from the wisdom of Texans, before the Supreme Court falsified the 2000 election results in what will always be falsely remembered as the American public electing George W. Bush president. Here comes Goldstein from Florida to warn us about Jeb. I don't see any reason why knowing about Jeb should make us take any interest in the election, as Hillary is just as bad. But I still see a problem with not knowing -- when it's all so easily known.

I'm also not sure Jeb won't end up making it all clear on his own. At the moment he's running around praising the U.S. war on Iraq (the last one, not the new one), antagonizing the president of Russia, and proposing public shaming for unwed mothers.

Yet the corporate press is complicit in the baseless idea that Jeb Bush is someone worth paying any attention to at all. It knows it was complicit in George's stolen election in which Jeb was complicit. It knows of the efforts it has gone to over the decades to uphold the acceptability of all the crimes of the brother, the father, the grandfather, and the great grandfather (Walker). The press has a lot invested in the pretense that Jeb Bush matters.

In case it matters to anyone, Goldstein lays out the record from Florida: giant giveaways to corporations and cronies, a pension fund invested in Enron, average wages plummeting, services for the elderly slashed, a drug plan that failed to reach 97.5% of the population, a high-school graduation rate that fell to the worst in the United States, anti-environmentalists appointed to boards, commissions, and judgeships, a mad power-grab rewriting of the state constitution to allow public funding of religion, welfare for Arthur Anderson while it evaded taxes, the opening of religion-run prisons ("I can't think of a better place to reflect on the awesome love of our Lord Jesus," quoth he), a crazed power grab to allow the governor to appoint all judges and the whole state university board of regents, and the repeated, undemocratic, blocking of public decisions expressed through referenda -- including killing public preschool by underfunding it.

One might think the Florida record was of limited value, as the number one thing the federal government does is make war, and Florida merely harbors terrorists who kill Cubans. But in fact Jeb Bush is not just a proven crony-crapitalist which pretty well guarantees wars (just like Hillary), but he was also a signer of the June 1997 Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century, along with Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Libby, Cheney, and the rest of the same crowd he still keeps with him. Jeb is not clinging to Dubya's warmongering record out of family loyalty. Jeb was pushing for those policies some 20 years ago and was only not part of his brother's disastrous regime because of the Florida gig and perhaps a bit of family disloyalty or political calculation.

But is anyone really ignorant of this? We're dealing with a Bush, and a Jeb for that matter. We're dealing with a system in which the most servile sycophants before corporate power are praised in the press as the most skilled money raisers, but nobody is entirely fooled and a majority of people ignore the single largest ad campaign of the year (and more) and refuse to vote at all.

Goldstein clearly leans Democratic Party, and his lesser-evil argument against Jeb rests primarily on speculation as to the sort of person he would appoint to the U.S. Supreme Court, combined with speculation about the sort of person a Democrat might appoint. It's a guessing game that cannot alter the fact that either Jeb or Hillary would run the war machine into apocalyptic crises and the natural environment into collapse. Still, as far as deck-chair rearranging goes it's as good a game as any.