When it comes to Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, the media was proved dead wrong on two counts Saturday when Trump won the South Carolina presidential primary and a disgraced Bush had to drop out after another dismal showing. Nobody up on the crow's nest saw this coming.

Not long ago, it was supposed to be the other way around. Primogeniture and polls once favored Bush's position. But for the $100 million candidate, who turned out to be a real dull "room emptier," as my father put it, adding the slogan Jeb! became a more dubious Jeb? His defiant reliance on his family to fight his battles, whether or not they were actually in the room, got tiresome, especially the peevish line, "My brother kept us safe." Columnist Kathleen Parker urged him not to be quite so familial – "my brother, my father, my mother" – but he could not let go of his identity as a Bush. When asked by Anderson Cooper what he was reading, Bush replied, "Destiny and Power," Jon Meacham's admiring biography of George H.W. Bush. Of course!

Our credibility is at stake. The mind of the media elite was just so wrong for most of 2015 up until the present, and it's no laughing matter for party chatter. Ship captains or city planners or musicians who performed so carelessly would face serious consequences for their mistakes – or wrecks. I can think of several pundits – all nice guys, so we're not naming names – who confidently wrote in black and white that Trump could not win the nomination. How did they know? They believed what they read in the papers and heard on the Sunday talk shows – a credulous conversation.

I felt all along that Trump was a formidable candidate and suggested that once or twice, only to get blown away by that old chorus about the Titanic before her maiden voyage in April 1912: "God himself could not sink this ship."

Yes. Jeb was the Titanic and Trump is the iceberg, still floating in the North Atlantic Sea. The Cuban-American senators, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, remain in contention, but they are sure to get sunk come March. Ohio Gov. John Kasich might give Trump the hardest fight, as he exudes Midwestern competence. Yes, that's what I'm saying. And further, that is what I would wish if I had to choose the Republican in the field to be president.

A liberal like me can actually make a separate peace with Trump. Why? Because I got a charge out of hearing him roundly condemn the Iraq War, fought on false grounds and the misbegotten mess it made of the Middle East. He spoke of New York movingly in the wake of September 11th. He understands Planned Parenthood is a women's health organization. Finally, he said something no other Republican would ever admit: "We have to take care of people who can't take care of themselves."

I also sense Trump's bluster and outrageous threats are not necessarily what he would do if elected president. More to the point now, the political media missed the currents of voter anger out there, which Trump is tapping into so deftly. With some shoe leather reporting, they could have picked up on the Trump groundswell. And some Florida digging would have revealed Bush's weaknesses as a governor. He kept a brain-dead woman alive against her family's wishes. He bragged about cutting government jobs. He stood in the way of Everglades restoration. Finally, he presided over the swing of the Florida presidential deadlock toward his brother, George W. Bush, in 2000. He's plain awkward and stilted with the English language, conspicuously lacking his brother's easy roguish charm.

Bowing out in South Carolina, Bush sported the new contact lens look, a painful reminder of how hard he tried to improve as a candidate after begging a group to clap. I felt sorry he must be beyond humiliated in the eyes of his aging father, who often said, "Go win," as kind of an endearment. But then Jeb Bush said something weird about his wife, calling her "the woman I'll sleep with tonight" and "the love of his life" without giving her name, Columba. By contrast, in his victory speech, Trump recognized his wife Melania and his daughter Ivanka and asked them each to speak.