Yesterday Bobby Jindal went out — on Fox News, of course — defiantly using the same Rhodes-scholar logic with which he came in: "We cannot settle for the left’s view of envy and division." We're still not sure what the left is envious is about, for Booby rarely lectured on this. But thanks to his tireless efforts in bashing the opposition as not only depraved but wildly divisive, Gov. Jindal proved that even Christian fundamentalists can appreciate irony, although they don't much cotton to it.
So Booby, sadly, is gone. Still, as Julie Andrews taught us all as children, when the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window. This He indeed accomplished working through the divine pollsters at the University of Massachusetts, who report that the undivisive Donald Trump is crushing his opposition, at 31 percent among likely GOP primary voters. Ben Carson has 22 percent. (The closest runners-up are Ted Cruz, at 13 percent, and Marco Rubio, at 9.)
It's even better than that. Trump and Carson are the only candidates whom a majority of likely Republican voters are willing to vote for — 54 percent say this of Trump; 56 percent of Carson. (Forty percent say Cruz; 39, Rubio.) Poor Jeb, poor lonesome Jeb, nearly as many — precisely half — say they are unwilling to vote for him in a primary. If one can be deader than Jacob Marley, dragging the weighty chains of the haunted establishment behind him, it is Jeb Bush.
And it gets better yet. "Which candidate," asked UMass, "do you think would have the best chance of winning the general election?" Forty percent said he of absolutely no chance whatsoever, Donald Trump, is the odds-on favorite, followed by Ben Carson — who possesses even less than absolutely no chance — at 24 percent. Thus two-thirds of the Republican primary electorate are hanging their tin foil (sorry, that was divisive: point, Jindal) on the least electable candidate since the Federalists' nominee of no one in 1820.
Where will it all end? I don't know and we can't say, given that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle now applies more to Republican politics than quantum physics. But the real fun begins in just over two months — and Republican primary voters are still living in their own, mysterious dimension.