Robert Stacy McCain

August 19, 2009

Whack! Whack! Whack! Just when I thought I had finally satisfied myself with whacking David Frum enough for one week—my God, if Bob Novak doesn’t deserve respectful silence from Frum now, who ever will and when?—up popped Michael Gerson, requiring me to swing the mallet some more.

Frankly, my arms are sore from all this whacking.

In the final weeks before last fall’s election, after John McCain’s frenzied push for the Wall Street bailout destroyed whatever hope remained of stopping Obama, I noticed telltale clues in the biographies of certain McCain staffers suspected of leaking smears against Sarah Palin. I said then that I believed these anti-Palin staffers were positioning themselves for employment on a future Jeb Bush presidential campaign.

People laughed at that suspicion—surely the Bush dynasty would not try for a restoration so soon—but subsequent events have only reinforced my belief that “Bush 45” is being plotted by many of the same architects of disaster who brought us Bush 41 and Bush 43:

The Jeb Bandwagon must be stopped. Nothing is more important to the future of the Republican Party, the conservative cause and the United States. Indeed, the fate of life on earth as we know it depends upon stopping Jeb.

Perhaps a slight exaggeration. But perhaps not. Symptoms of a recrudescence of Bushism—including Gerson’s collaboration in Commentary with Peter Wehner, a longtime Bushling—must be monitored closely if America is to be spared further ravages of that lethal disease. Fellow conservatives who have doubts about the suitability of Palin need to consider that the erstwhile Alaska governor may be the only viable alternative to a “Jeb 2012” catastrophe cooked up by the GOP Establishment types who thought “Dole ‘96” to be such a clever move.

READ MY LIPS: NO MORE BUSHES!