Pun Salad

Jeb's phony hit count from last week was (indeed) one of those Google Glitches. Not that he doesn't retain his firm hold on the number one spot:

• Boston Globe columnist Scott Lehigh uses Mitt Romney's exit from the race as a springboard to generalize about the problem of political authenticity: "Voters want political candidates to get real". No great insights here, but you might find his classifications either convincing or contestable. Phony: Romney, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, both Clintons, and Kerry. Authentic: Reagan, Ford, Carter, and Obama (!?)

• Lehigh does not provide his assessment of Jeb Bush, but his paper did its part with a hit piece researching his time at Phillips Academy in Andover MA, the kind of research they never seem to do about Democrats. While some of the more scurrlious yarns are unconfimed, Jeb has admitted that he was a lousy student, partaking of both alcohol and pot.

  And yet, as many have pointed out, he went on to be an eager participant in the drug war, putting less fortunate people in the slammer for the same thing he got away with at Andover. For example, Rand Paul:

  “He was even opposed to medical marijuana,” Paul said of Bush, a potential rival in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. “This is a guy who now admits he smoked marijuana but he wants to put people in jail who do.

  Well, at least he wasn't in the Choom Gang.

• One side effect of NBC News anchorman Brian Williams long-running fabrications has been for people to recall Hillary's equally fabulist yarn about coming under sniper fire during her visit to Bosnia in 1996. For example, Linda Stasi in the New York Daily News:

  The fact that Brian Williams and Clinton thought they’d get away with their outrageous war stories despite there being living, breathing witnesses, video and now social media, is bizarrely disturbing. The hubris of the famous in believing that they can get away with lying forever because they are above it all never fails to astound. And never fails to happen.

  It's the sort of thing that makes me doubt Scott Lehigh's belief that voters want authenticity in their political candidates. Dude, if that were even close to being true, Hillary would be baking cookies in Little Rock.