The stage and script are set for JEB! vs. Hillary (and imperial doom)

The recent Wall Street Journal report that JEB! is telling his potential fat cat donor base to hold off on committing to anyone else portends a high likelihood that the Crown Prince is now committed to a royal Bush run for the POTUS purple in 2016.  This has occurred together with renewed buzz about the potential for Wall Street Willard to mount another buyout attempt in two years as well.  The conflicting chatter has generated several absurd scenarios.  One of the more outlandish, and nonsensical, is that JEB! is faking interest in a Presidential run to help Romney look like a more electable and attractive Establishment option (over another Bush), meaning JEB! won't run and Romney will, with that outcome already decided.

A more plausible scenario is that Romney will run, but only if JEB! (technically still undecided but very likely to exercise his royal option on the nomination) ultimately bows out. Such a demurral being part of the "gentlemen's agreement" regarding 2012 and 2016 reached between Romney and King George I HW and Dowager Queen Babs back at their Houston Winter Palace summit in December 2011.  At the other end of unlikely would be a head on dynastic clash between Romney and JEB! prior to the main event between JEB! and Hillary.  If that occurred there is no doubt that the Bush family, and retainers like Rove, would destroy Romney for double crossing them, so yes it would end up in JEB! vs. Hillary, with Romney's political career in complete shambles, not even ambassador material.

The recent meltdown of the doomed Bush neocon client state of Iraq into a failed state with ISIS in control of a good bit of it has set up a revanchist showdown between two presidential dynasties that offers the potential to wreck and bankrupt the American empire in the deserts of the Middle East regardless of who wins out.  The main difference being with the third Bush it would be a fast express into imperial oblivion, and with Hillary a more protracted ride.

Obama will never look comfortable downplaying the part of an American version of the Roman Emperor Hadrian.  Two men who entered office with a philosophy of transcending war and both ironically forced into renewing imperial war in the historical sandtrap that is the Middle East.

Hadrian rose to the demand, if negatively, and found the will to engage in one of history's most notorious and brutal examples of ethnic cleansing in order to restore Roman imperial authority. Obama, in his era, will try to split the difference between Bush's reckless and misguided imperial policies, and non-engagement, and likely will solve little of the problem, and please no one.

Which means both Hillary and JEB! will be forced by their own ambitions into running to Obama's right on war.  And commit the US to an unending money pit of a struggle in the flaming oilfields.

Both will offer to "do what it takes" to pacify the Iraq that King George II W set on fire.  But make no mistake, if the deconstruction of the Middle East, post W. and Dick Cheney, allows a third Bush to worm his way into power promising "love" at home and "tough love" abroad, the result will be a historic and empire ending disaster for the United States.

Hillary will offer the right rhetoric, and if elected would probably commit US troops to ground operations, however limited, in certain areas and situations, and generally she would turn the operations over to the generals. JEB! would enter office as the ultimate tool of the neocons and the speculator class, and the scenario that would unfold with Bush 3.0 would be relentlessly depressing and destructive.

The border between the US and Mexico would become a state line through which any terrorist could, and would, freely pass. One or more "major domestic" attacks would occur within months of JEB!'s inauguration. Thousands of US troops would pour back into Iraq, Afghanistan, and into Syria, to stay there until the federal government can't pay the bills to keep them there, and war with Iran would be the ultimate neocon end game this time. The arms makers, and rent-a-mercenary contractors would make out like the bandits they are. Kleptocracy in education, massive additional tax windfalls for oil companies, and financial speculators, and it all ends in a final economic collapse that no taxpayer-funded bailout can stop, and national bankruptcy. Which will be blamed all and solely on Obama, of course. And the dumb dolts who vote every Bush into office will buy every bit of it.

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