America doesn’t deserve another Bush presidency. Sad deflated balloon animal Jeb Bush is dropping out of the presidential race.John Ellis Bush, last of a ragged house long bereft of dignity or lordship, suffered the final indignity of a long shit-eating campaign season when the hill-folk and shrimp-herders of South Carolina turned away from him. Even the perfumed secessionist dandies of Charleston ignored him, despite the endless golden Reagan-effigy buckets of money he rained down on them. Oh, they took his money. They just didn’t vote for him. The hill-folk rallied to the guttural croaking of cartoon villain Donald Trump, and his boiled-shrimp coloration reminded the shrimp-herders of the coast of their shrimp gods. The shrimp-herders despised Bush because he looks and sounds like the businessmen who routinely screw them out of their shrimp harvests.
It had all started off so well, though. The plan was to copy his brother’s playbook, and amass such a huge pile of campaign money that all the lesser governors and senators and other riff-raff would be awed by his mightiness and drop out. Back in the summer, he had rented a vast storage space in Boca Raton that had once been used to refurbish yachts, and had filled it with pallets of cash. Vast, vast pallets of cash. Cash that his dad had stolen from Noriega’s drug hoard. His grandfather’s Nazi gold. His great-great grandfather Ebeneezer Prescott Bush Junior’s opium money. It was a mighty pile. For luck, his dad’s friend, Rumsfeld, had given him one of the ceremonial money-burning urns that Reagan installed in front of the Pentagon. Bush was careful to keep the sacred fire burning and pray to Reagan every day, but it was all for nothing.
The lesser elected officials were not sufficiently awed by his money heap, and junior senators, including Marco Rubio–Marco Rubio! from his own state!–refused to wait their turn. And then, Bush earned the ire of a cartoon villain billionaire. Donald Trump, star of the claymation Christmas specials How The Billionaire Ruined Christmas and A Very Billionaire Christmas, Too! cruelly turned poor old Jeb into his plaything. Trump mocked Bush incessantly during the debates, deriding him as “low energy.” It wasn’t entirely fair, as Bush wasn’t any lower in energy than some of the other candidates. Marco Rubio, for example, would frequently experience shut-downs and go into energy-saver mode during debates. The demeaning moniker stuck, though, in much the same way that his great-great-grandfather Ebeneezer Prescott Bush was unable to escape the nickname “Ebeneezer Petticoat Bush” that Millard Fillmore tagged him with in the 1848 election. Historians are reasonably sure that Eb Bush did not actually wear women’s petticoats, but the damage was done. So it was with poor Jeb.
Jeb spent tens of millions of dollars in Iowa, only to come in a humiliating sixth place. The campaign cash was moved from the yacht facility to a regular U-Store storage unit in Des Moines. Not a big unit, either, that a prosperous family might use temporarily as they relocate to the town where dad got a big promotion. It was the smallish kind that a divorced guy in his late twenties might use to store some shabby IKEA furniture. By the time of the New Hampshire primaries, the once-vast money hoard would fit comfortably in the trunk of Jeb’s 1995 Cadillac de Ville. Jeb had bought that car to cheer himself up after losing the 1994 Florida governors race.
But nothing could cheer him now. Jeb was humiliated once again in New Hampshire, and by South Carolina, it was clear that the end had come. Jeb had surpassed old Eb Bush and become the worst Bush presidential campaigner of all time. In a desolate swamp outside of Charleston, Bush family retainers built the ritual bonfire while Jeb spoke to his few remaining followers. “Farewell, my friends!” he said, though they weren’t really friends in the sense that they liked him. “I go now to the halls of my fathers!” he cried, as the last of the campaign cash was hurled into the pyre. He then hugged some of the prop children that are kept around campaign events just in case there are photographers, and then walked off into the night. Fox News reported that he leapt on the pyre and was consumed, but this is unconfirmed. Associated Press and Reuters both report that he wandered into the swamp. “His fate is the will of the swamp now,” an anonymous Bush staffer reported.
