2016 Presidential Candidate Roundup, Part II (Lasso Them at Your Own Risk)

By P.J. O'Rourke

Then there are the Republicans...

Jeb Bush

He has everything. He's young (for a Republican), a Phi Beta Kappa, a successful businessman, and a two-term governor of Florida – where balloting incompetence and corruption are vital to the GOP.

Jeb is fluent in Spanish. His wife is Hispanic. He has a bunch of kids, and they're Hispanic, too. Maybe he'll choose Marco Rubio as his running mate. Kiss the Latino vote goodbye, Democrats.

Plus, Jeb is rolling like a dirty dog in campaign contributions.

Jeb Bush has just one problem. Perhaps you can take a "Bush-league" guess at what it is. But don't worry, Jeb is all set to legally change his name to George Herbert Walker Bush. Everybody likes him... and he only served one term, so he's constitutionally eligible to run again.

Carly Fiorina

Maybe she can run America the way she ran Hewlett-Packard. I mean, the way she ran HP was fabulous... if you had shorted the stock.

Hewlett-Packard's stock price fell 65% between July 1999 and February 2005. I may forgive Carly, but my Keogh Plan never will.

Ben Carson

There isn't a word to be said against Dr. Carson. He's a soft-spoken gentleman who rose from a background of social adversity and economic deprivation that makes President Obama look like the lost Bush brother.

Carson went to Yale, University of Michigan Medical School, and completed his residency at Johns Hopkins, becoming the hospital's youngest-ever Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at age 33 in 1984.

To put that in perspective, 1984 was the year that Donald Trump was laying the foundation for his first bankruptcy in Atlantic City... Jeb Bush was chairing meetings of the Dade County Republican Party in a phone booth... Carly Fiorina was in the break room making coffee for AT&T executives... and Marco Rubio was in eighth grade.

Dr. Carson was the first surgeon to successfully separate Siamese twins conjoined at the head. He has 38 honorary doctorate degrees, in addition to his real one. And he has received the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

This is why I am asking you, Dr. Carson, to please quit running for president.

Get back to work, damn it! We need you. George W. and Jeb's heads might get conjoined. True, they're not twins. But the Bush family is inbred, and freakish things can result from inbreeding.

Or, Dr. Carson, you could be removing Donald Trump's ruptured silicone brain implant that is endangering Republicans everywhere.

Dr. Carson, you are valuable. Presidential candidates are not.

Your mother wanted you to be a doctor. Politics is the career that we Americans choose for our loser children.

Many of us have sons and daughters who won't get into medical school, start a business, join the military, learn a trade, raise a family, perform volunteer work, or do anything else of value to society. We send these children into politics.

Politics is a lot different than medicine.

Dr. Carson, if you win the nomination, you'll be running against Hillary Clinton (not Bernie Sanders – he's still wanted on a House Un-American Activities Committee subpoena from 1961).

That quack and her husband have been in the Washington political operating room for a long time. They're splattered with gore from the butchery they've committed on their hapless patient, the body politic.

Severed limbs of liberty litter the floor. The country's aorta has been ripped out and tossed beneath the heart-lung machine of federal bureaucracy. Intestinal fortitude has been disemboweled and the guts of nationhood spill forth while the elected-official sawbones drink the tax dollar lifeblood of America from the IV fluid drip. The mask of media anesthesia has been clamped upon the electorate's face. Vital signs have flatlined.

Dr. Carson, I don't think you can save this patient.

And lastly, we come to the candidate whom I actually support – and not just because his dad would kick me if I didn't...

Rand Paul

Rand believes the federal government should obey the rule, "Mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself."

I call it The Bill and Hillary Clinton Principle. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.

Unfortunately, Rand Paul isn't going to get the Republican nomination. This is because Senator Paul is not just a Republican, he's a Libertarian.

The bluenose, mossback Republicans who run the GOP are not Libertarians. They're as fond of big government interference as the Clintons are – as long as it's bluenose, mossback Republicans who get to do the interfering.

Rand Paul's libertarianism appeals to those who consider themselves "fiscal conservatives and social liberals." This means they want to get high and have sex while saving money. And who doesn't?

But what bluenose, mossback Republican will admit to that in public?

Rand Paul isn't going to get the nomination.

My editor has asked me to sum up these analyses, so I will: You're screwed.

Regards,

P.J. O'Rourke