Bush dynasty: Chapter 3

There's still two weeks of heavy Republican sleaze-slinging to go.  Kerry looks like the winner at this point, but I don't want to be over-optimistic.  After all, Al Gore won by a decisive margin in 2000, and look who's president now.

But let's not be lulled into thinking that the eight-year limitation on presidential terms will automatically free us from the Bush dynasty's misrule in 2009:  Jeb Bush Rules Out 2008 White House Run AP 10/17/04.

Gov. Jeb Bush said Sunday he will not run for president in 2008 and defended his brother from critics who say the president refuses to acknowledge his mistakes.

The governor also denied a report that he knew of problems with a list of felons to be purged from the state's voter rolls months before it was discarded.

Such denials are standard fare from presidential candidates, of course, even ones who don't have the same special relationship to reality as the Bush dynasty.  But given the following, one might question why the headline was written as it was:

Bush said he was not going to think about his next move until after completing his second term in 2006. In an Associated Press survey in August, more than a third of the state's Republican delegates said they favored Bush as the party's presidential candidate in 2008.

Oh, and that little problem with the voter rolls:

Most of those wrongly purged were Democrats and many were black. Hispanics, who often vote Republican in Florida, were almost entirely absent from the list due to a technical error when the two state databases were merged.

I fully expect Jeb to make a run in 2008, whether or not the current leader of the Bush dynasty is removed in this year's election.