So I see a lot of online commentators saying Jeb! Bush is toast, as if he hasn't got a chance since he needed to change the game with last night's debate and failed to do so. His chances of winning the Republican nomination may be down around Bill Maher's but politics — at least this kind of politics — doesn't work like that. In sports, as the late Yogi Berra said, it ain't over 'til it's over. In nomination-seeking, it ain't over until your big donors tell you it's over.
It wouldn't surprise me if he got out tomorrow but it also wouldn't surprise me if he stayed in the game — denial apparently being hereditary to the Bush clan — a few more months. He may just think the guys ahead of him in the polls are all so unstable that they could all self-destruct before long. As I understand it, Jeb! still has a lot of money to spend on his campaign. You'll know he's in trouble when he starts selling that exclamation point on eBay to raise funds.
Speaking of which! Mark Thorson, one of my correspondents here who catches a lot of my klutzier typos, sent me this link to an article about a California man who won the right to have an exclamation point in his name. Scott Shaw!, are you listening?
One thing that bothered me about last night's debate was the tremendous amount of factual errors that were made by candidates. There are some in any debate, G.O.P. or Dem, but I don't recall this volume before, nor do I recall them being so defended as some sort of plot by the Liberal Media. Donald Trump denies something that's clearly stated on his website and it's not, "Oops, sorry, I misspoke." It's an attack on the questioner's fact-checking. That's real high school.
During the Bush-Kerry election, I lost a friend…well, first I lost the ability to talk with him and then I lost the friendship. He was hysterical in his belief that within weeks of a Kerry inauguration, America would be a scorched wasteland with the few survivors staggering about looking for others to eat. To him, there were no unflattering lies about Kerry. Everything negative was inarguably true. I had pro-Bush friends (I still do) with whom I could discuss matters. They had misgivings about their guy as I did about Kerry and I think we all voted for the lesser evil, even though we didn't concur on who that was.
But the Kerry-hating acquaintance? Anything bad about Bush was "Liberal Propaganda," not to be considered because, you know, it came from people who were not Bush supporters. That alone proved it was a lie. He really had a trouble having his good/evil views diluted in any way.
I've never backed a candidate who I didn't think had negatives. I have a lot of reservations about Hillary Clinton's plans regarding foreign policy and about Bernie Sanders' lack of very many plans in that area. I don't really want to listen to anyone who thinks their candidate can't do anything wrong because I find those discussions invariably go nowhere except maybe Fantasyland.
Last night, Ben Carson told a lie that even some leading right-wing commentators (like this one) can't paint over claiming media malpractice. If that howler had been uttered by a Democrat — an Al Gore or a Clinton or Obama — we'd be hearing that the person was a Congenital Liar; not just that he or she was a liar but that they had some deep emotional flaw or mental illness that compelled them to spout falsehoods the way a Tourette's victim hurls "f" bombs. I understand the political strategy there. Convince people your opponent can't speak the truth to save his life and you don't have to rebut the true things he says that you don't want your supporters to consider.
There are a lot of good fact-checking sites out there like Factcheck.Org and Politifact. Since they're manned by humans, they can make mistakes — though I've never thought they were all wrong about anything. When I hear someone say they're all biased and not to be believed, I think someone is really, really afraid of being exposed as a fibber. If you hear anyone say I'm wrong about this, don't believe them because they're surely a biased congential liar.