The Republicans are scrambling to find a better candidate, but it will be several weeks yet before the name Homer Jethro is on everyone’s lips.

McCain has pursued a high-cost strategy of sucking up to Bush loyalists, who hate him. His support will soon be in negative numbers. (He gets into negative numbers when respondents say they don’t know who they support, but definitely not McCain.) While people are intrigued by the Hero Rudy, they will soon realize that 999 days out of 1,000, what they will get is the Cranky, Crazy Rudy. He once tried to throw the Brooklyn Museum out of the Brooklyn Museum building, and that was a fairly typical day in Rudyville during his reign. Romney, who is already doing miserably, will fall further in the polls when an internal campaign paper is leaked that shows he intends to use “gentiles” to fill out the bottom ranks of Mormon pyramid schemes. Then there will be a shock when it is disclosed that Thompson accepted $150 to lobby for mandatory abortion, a universal handgun ban, government-arranged gay marriage for everyone, elimination of religion and cancer.

So the Republicans will have to dig deep to find a candidate untainted by scandal, a track record or knowledge. Homer T. Jethro is such a man. He has never been outside Deep Hollow, W.Va., except short bus trips to nearby Skunk Springs, W.Va., where he completed the third grade.

As far as his campaign staff has been able to determine, he has never taken a stand on any issue that could lose him support. Initially, he was reluctant to move to Washington because he feared there would be no ready market for his ‘coon pelts. But his supporters assured him that the president receives a salary. When he said he had no use for checks, they offered to pay him in crisp new bills. Not believing in paper money, he did agree to accept $4 a week, if it was paid in solid silver quarters.

The campaign will try to keep the moonshine issue under wraps. With careful handling, Homer can be kept reasonably sober until noon. Karl Rove is already at work on an ingenious strategy to attack the other candidates for not being able to down a half gallon of 180 proof white lightning before an appearance.

Here is how the campaign will play out: The New York Times will spend the next 14 months working on an expose to prove Homer could not have legally killed a bear before the age of 4 because he had no hunting license. Fox, advancing the Davy Crockett myth from the Disney song, will announce that Homer is a hero and determine therefore that anyone who doesn’t believe he “patched up the crack in the Liberty Bell” is a traitor. Most of the media will think Homer Jethro is fun, and not want to pick on him. They will dig into the positions taken by the other candidates because they have positions.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney will move forward creating his additional branches of government. As Cheney’s body is about shot, his head will be removed, attached to a heart-lung machine, and mounted on a five-foot pillar in the center of the Jefferson Memorial. The building will be closed to the public for national security reasons. Cheney will of course have a mechanical arm mounted on the pillar, which will wield his shotgun.

The new fourth branch of government, already hitting its stride, will be the super-executive, telling everyone in the executive branch, including President Jethro, what to do. The fifth branch of government will determine what bills Congress can consider as well as the outcomes of all votes. The sixth branch will tell the Supreme Court how to decide cases. Cheney, or rather Cheney’s head, will be the seventh branch of government, controlling all the others. Checks and balances will be maintained in the bundle of nerves that connect the right and left halves of Cheney’s brain.

Despite the campaign based on patriotism, religious pandering, free money for lobbyists and gay bashing, the aim of the Jethro administration will be to make things much worse. An open-ended war with Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and the continent of Africa, will sap America’s resources and make voters nostalgic for the good old days of the Bush Administrations. That will set the stage for Jeb to run in 2016.