Word leaking out of the Jeb! Bush camp indicates we won’t have him to kick around much longer. Yesterday, Erick Erickson reported at The Resurgent that his campaign is flat-broke and busted…

This is pretty remarkable. Sources close to the Bush campaign are beginning to leak about a call last night. I’m told the Bush team is out of money. Pay for campaign staff will end on Saturday. The campaign is all but over.

Additionally, after having hundreds of millions of dollars on hand, the Bush Super PAC has less than $15 million from what I am being told.

Bush’s campaign continues in South Carolina, at least until the vote tomorrow. But it’s definitely a last stand. That’s apparent from the fact that Jeb! has his brother and mother on the stump for him.

There is nothing wrong with having Barbara Bush appearing with you at campaign events. Barbara Bush is great. She’s funny, she oozes charisma, and she represent something we would love to have as a standard for people in public life.

But there is something wrong with Jeb Bush having her appear with him.

Namely, that for months he’s pushed the point that he’s his own man, and the campaign logo which says “Jeb!” without any reference to Bush is indicative of that campaign’s recognition of a fundamental truth – and in fact something that Barbara Bush herself said. Namely, that “the country has had enough Bushes.”

People forget that, but she said it publicly in the period before Jeb decided to run. She made it pretty clear that his running was not what she wanted.

And Barbara Bush, as she nearly always is, was right. The country has certainly had enough Bushes. A Bush has been president for 12 of the last 27 years, and were Jeb to win and be re-elected that number would swell to 20 of the last 36 years. There would be something fundamentally off-kilter about one family occupying the White House for the better part of almost two generations. She knew that was a bad idea.

But Jeb did not. He decided to run even against that headwind. And when he ran, his strategy was precisely the one people were sick of – the patrician, stilted presentation and messaging, the insistence on racking up establishment donor money at the outset, the Mitt Romney-style PAC ads hammering away at the competition. If Jeb was to have any chance of winning, he needed to show himself to be a different kind of Bush. He had to not just say he was his own man but prove it by offering the public something unquestionably new.

Safe to say we didn’t get that at all. And the only thing his campaign produced is big, fat checks to his consultants for doing phoned-in quality of work for him. The inner circle of that campaign, and particularly Mike Murphy who was the lead consultant, needs to go back to selling insurance or Cadillacs or whatever else advertising and marketing people who are flushed out of politics do.

Jeb is going to finish no better than fourth in South Carolina tomorrow. He might even finish sixth. And that’s what that campaign deserves. Hopefully Erickson’s reports are true and Saturday is the end, because Jeb is in the way of a consolidation of the field and his voters, as well as those of Ben Carson and John Kasich, need to find their way to the most viable alternative to Trump.

If that doesn’t happen, particularly before we start getting into the winner-take-all primaries, Trump is going to start grabbing all the delegates from some big states despite only getting about a third of the vote.

 

 – Speaking of Trump, boy did he get a gift from the Pope yesterday.

You’ve got to hand it to Pope Francis. This guy will opine on just about anything, and he’ll do it in a way that causes the maximum amount of political upheaval.

Did it occur to him that the Vatican where he lives is surrounded by a giant wall? Does it mean the people in the Vatican aren’t good Christians because they have a wall? Because that’s what it sounds like when he says Trump isn’t a good Christian because he wants to build one on the Mexican border.

Christians have built walls for millennia. It’s a stupid statement that you can’t build a wall or a fence to keep people off your property who don’t belong there and to control who you let in and who you don’t.

Furthermore, trashing Trump on this topic is to trash the majority of the American people, who want the damn wall and want the border secured. Even most of the pro-amnesty people want the border secured. Are they bad Christians, according to the Pope?

After that dumb statement, almost anything Trump says wins him the news cycle. So naturally he goes and pushes the envelope by making the ridiculous statement that a religious leader shouldn’t question anyone’s faith. That’s nonsense, and it sounds like it came from somebody who played in an everybody-gets-a-trophy soccer league as a kid. Good religious leaders challenge the faith of people all the time; that’s not what makes what Francis said inappropriate – what made it inappropriate was that a wall on the Mexican border is a policy issue which doesn’t have anything to do with faith or spirituality or morality.

Trump also mentioned that if ISIS were to get what they wanted, which is to attack the Vatican with a terrorist attack, the Pope would be praying for Trump because he’d never let them get hit. That was pretty good.

But for the rest of us, this stupid back-and-forth just offers the vision of a fight between Catholics and Protestants within the Republican Party. Which is ALL we need right now. Thanks to everyone involved.

 

 – And then there’s this old hag…

Sue us if you want, but that isn’t going to be president. Not a chance in hell.

– And now, per our custom, we close with something especially light and stupid…