Do read Draft Jeb! by Charles Pierce. Then come back here.

Jeb — ‘scuse me, Jeb! — actually scares me more than the clowns currently running. Yeah, he’s as corrupt and hypocritical as the rest of the bushies, but he cleans up well. Unlike the other presidential hopefuls, he doesn’t have visible bats flying around his head.

Also unlike the current candidates, he would enjoy the benefit of the unified GOP establishment and its propaganda machine. Americans will hear nothing but what a great guy he is. The biggest challenge to his campaign will be keeping little brother George locked in a basement until after the election.

Jeb’s got an op ed in today’s Washington Post about how American capitalism is being strangled by taxes and regulations. This is total bullshit, of course, but the wingnuts eat this stuff up. I’m thinking Jeb’s taking steps to shine up his “conservative” credentials and get his name in circulation.

Meanwhile, Newt is crashing in Iowa, and Ron Paul has taken the lead. This feels a bit like hearing that Tandy computers are making a comeback and overtaking Dell. Nate Silver is giving Paul a 44 percent chance at winning Iowa.

Brokered convention? I think it’s too late to get on primary ballots.

If it isn’t too painful, try to remember the 2000 presidential campaign for a moment. If you can do that, you might remember that Al Gore was persistently called a “serial liar” in the mainstream press.

Bob Somerby has a good background article on how that happened. According to Somerby, the “serial liar” meme that was built around allegations that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet or was the inspiration for “Love Story” originated in an editorial in the New York Post, the same rag that more recently went overboard churning up dirt on OWS. And as we all witnessed, the bobbleheads picked up each alleged example of the Vice President’s lies, and repeated them over and over, even after the alleged example was debunked.

What was especially pathetic, as Somerby points out, was that the so-called lies were all about trivial matters that had little to do with Gore’s policy proposals. They were just bits of trivia taken out of context, distorted beyond recognition, and then repeated endlessly by every “pundit” or reporter covering politics.

Meanwhile, George W. Bush could make claims about his economic proposals that were false on their face, and the mainstream media (except for the New York Times‘s new economics columnist Paul Krugman) said not a word. And as I remember, Krugman complained later that his editors wouldn’t allow him to say that Bush was lying.

These days there should be headlines when a Republican tells the truth, since it’s such a rare occurrence. But Steve Benen points out today that a large part of Mitt Romney’s campaign shtick amounts to repeating long-debunked lies about President Obama. So can we all call Mittens a “serial liar” now?

Just when you (maybe) were adjusting to the idea that Newt Gingrich is the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination, Public Policy Polling announces that Newt’s frontrunner status is being challenged by … Ron Paul.

I keep thinking that Tim Pawlenty must be kicking himself 24/7 these days. But Steve Kornacki says the biggest reason Romney can’t close the deal is that southerners think he is a space alien. Romney is so not southern he makes Barack Obama look like Foghorn Leghorn.

I personally don’t think the Mormonism is the whole story. Speaking as a hillbilly myself, I think most of my people could handle a Mormon candidate if he seemed human and could push the right cultural buttons. Mittens strikes me as someone who would show up at a backyard barbeque wearing a suit and then eating his ribs and chicken with a knife and fork. Like I said, a space alien. Plus, he speaks French.

The rise of Paul is supposed to help Mittens in Iowa, but it’s the South that’s going to really matter.

Continuing the Survivor metaphor from the last post — Herman Cain just voted himself off the island.

“Democratic pollsters” Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen are once again patiently explaining to readers of the Wall Street Journal why President Obama should surrender the White House without a fight.

When Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson accepted the reality that they could not effectively govern the nation if they sought re-election to the White House, both men took the moral high ground and decided against running for a new term as president. President Obama is facing a similar reality—and he must reach the same conclusion.

He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president’s accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Never before has there been such an obvious potential successor—one who has been a loyal and effective member of the president’s administration, who has the stature to take on the office, and who is the only leader capable of uniting the country around a bipartisan economic and foreign policy.

Some things do snark themselves, don’t they?

One year ago in these pages, we warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be “guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it.”

You cannot make this up. Well, I couldn’t, anyway. Caddell and Schoen can, though.

If President Obama were to withdraw, he would put great pressure on the Republicans to come to the table and negotiate—especially if the president singularly focused in the way we have suggested on the economy, job creation, and debt and deficit reduction.

To Caddell and Schoen, for Republicans to “come to the table and negotiate” translates into “accepting the Democrats’ unconditional surrender.”

By going down the re-election road and into partisan mode, the president has effectively guaranteed that the remainder of his term will be marred by the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity, common purpose, and most of all, our economic strength.

But of course, if Hillary Clinton were president, all Washington would join hands and sing kum-bye-yah. Because the Republicans would never wage a propaganda war smearing Mrs. Clinton every time she breathed. Oh, wait …

Anyway … Caddell and Schoen are one-time “Democratic pollsters” who have carved out a career for themselves writing nonsense like this. And I wonder if even Republicans are demented enough to believe it, although they certainly seem to enjoy reading it. I’ve been trying to think of an analogy for them — Caddell and Schoen are to the GOP what Tokyo Rose was to Japan. Something like that. But perhaps one of you could do better.

Wow, do they ever hate Mittens. Yet they can’t seem to get rid of him. Brent Budowsky writes,

Mitt Romney is having great trouble winning the loyalty of Republican voters above the 25 percent level. About 75 percent of Republicans do not support Romney as their first choice. In fact, for many of these GOP voters Romney is their fourth, sixth or even eighth choice behind the conservatives now running and the conservatives who chose not to run.

Mittens is like the zombie candidate who won’t die. The only reason he has stayed near the top of the polls, Budowsky says, is that Republican voters are divided amongst the remainder of the candidates. And the remainder of the candidates are such losers that they wilt almost as soon as a spotlight hits them. Herman Cain has given it about as good a run as anyone has, but now his popularity is sagging under the weight of sexual allegations.

(BTW, righties, do pay attention and notice that “liberals” are not the primary force behind dragging those old allegations into the light. We are not the ones interested in undermining Herman Cain’s campaign at this point.)

(Also too, this is one of the dumbest things I’ve read yet about the matter.)

Budowsky wants conservatives to rally behind one not-Mittens candidate, or else take steps to drag the selection out so that it can be brokered at the convention. Jeb! Jeb! Jeb!

But John Batchelor at Daily Beast says Mittens will win the Iowa caucus, because Mittens is the only one whose got the money in the game to get people to the caucus.

“It’s gonna be Romney, and the party is miserable,” observed a Republican agent just back from the presidential contest in Iowa. “One day Bachmann, the next day Perry, then another day Cain, now Newt. The flavor of the day will pass. Why do many Fox contributors become candidates? It gets you in the debates and polls. But it doesn’t stick. Iowa is about paying an organization to show up. They are used to it. It’s an entitlement to Iowa. First in the nation means mercenaries, buying up the talent, then bringing the people you paid for to the caucus.”

Is he saying that caucus participants are being paid to vote? Or am I misreading something?

Nate Silver says that both Mittens and Cain are slumping a bit in the polls, but Newt is surging. Will Newt maintain flavor of the month status going into the early primaries (for which everyone says he lacks the organization on the ground to do that well), or will it be Rick Santorum’s turn by then?

First the FUNDRAISER. My annual fall fundraiser really does make the difference between me having a roof over my hear or living in a cardboard box under an overpass, so please help if you are able.

Second, I was sorry to hear that a woman has come forward today to accuse Herman Cain of sexual assault in 1997. I regret the right-wing smear job that is about to fall upon this woman, Sharon Bialek, who held a press conference today with her attorney, Gloria Allred.

I also regret that this may derail Herman Cain’s presidential campaign, as I was beginning to hope he would derail Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. But, so far, Cain’s supporters on the blogosphere are dismissing the charge as “rent-seeking” and note that the accuser is from Chicago.

See also: Decline and Fall by David Remnick.