The “Jeb Bush For President: 2016” campaign is having its moment. Everyone is having a 2016 moment, because no one wants to think about this moment, the “The Democrats hope that by standing for nothing they can cautiously back into maintaining some control of Congress” moment. Only they won’t maintain that control, so we’re all sitting around, waiting to see by how much the Democrats lose and instead indulging Jeb Bush’s moment.

I do not like this moment, which was kicked off by Jeb’s son. (His name is George, natch). I do not like what it means for Hillary. I do not like what it means at all.

I do not like his name.

Selfishly, I do not like it, because I do not like Jeb – and I do not like Jeb because he is a false Jeb. He is a Jeb of Lies. I don’t mean politically, mind you, although that is also true. I mean in the sense that his name is John Ellis Bush. That makes him “Jeb” in the way my initials make me “jittle,” which is to say: not at all. “Jeb” ruins Jeb for those of us with the decency to be born Jeb with the name neither short for anything else nor cobbled together by choice. He also sucks.

I know what you’re going to say. “There’s nothing wrong with that name.” To which, blessedly, I can reply by paraphrasing Office Space: “No, there was nothing wrong with that name, until I was about 16 years old and that no-talent assclown started running for governor of the state I lived in.”

Although there was nothing especially great with that name to begin with – growing up in San Francisco, kids put on bad southern accents and called me redneck. When I moved to North Florida, rednecks with names like Bobby Lee winked at me because they “knew” what my name meant.

Bush, on the other hand, wants that kind of winking recognition from rednecks –Civil War name affinity always plays well with the “states’ rights!” crowd. Plus there’s the hope that down-home country folk’ll see a name like Jeb and feel an utterly baseless sense of kinship with a scion of a Connecticut banking and oil speculating clan whose sons have gone on to be president (twice), vice-president, governor (twice), CIA director and senator.

Yes, I’ll grant that his family has perhaps always called him Jeb, but you are where you came from – and no amount of going by “Jeb” effaces his patrician roots, just like my citing a quarter century of Florida residence will never fully wipe away my featureless NorCal accent and Bay Area food snobbery.

The most dislikable feature of Jeb’s name, however, is his last: it comes with enough baggage to fill several staterooms on whatever geopolitical Titanic he might wish to send steaming toward the Middle East after 2016. But “Bush” acts as full counterweight to “Clinton” in the he-said, she-said structure of modern objective reporting: the moment one dynasty faces another on a ballot, the political value of attacking the idea of a “dynasty” becomes totally neutralised.

It shouldn’t.

Whatever your feelings about Hillary Clinton, her career clearly presents a greater record of individual achievement than, say, the ultimate failing-upward trajectory of someone like George W Bush. That nepotism attaches to her is indisputable, but it’s a more striving nepotism than the Bush clan’s, as she’s without the benefit of two preceding generations of wealth and elected service. Whatever gains she reaped from being at her husband’s side also derives from the work she did to help him get elected – to say nothing of her work in the law before or as a senator and Secretary of State after.

Still, we should ask whether the level of nepotism in government and its watchdogs is less the result of “bright people growing up around various players and learning the game sooner and better” or a return to Gilded Age system of government as the client state of various clans. As income inequality expands ever more disastrously and political change becomes beholden less to elections than to wealth – as men like Rick Scott can cripple regulation by circumventing buying officials and instead indulge in buying office – we should conduct more conversations about dynasties.

Nepotism in other settings rankles people without much effort – from Jakob “Son of Bob” Dylan and the Wallflowers to the entire cast of Girls to Chelsea Clinton’s NBC News contract (or an episode of MSNBC’s The Cycle with Abby Huntsman and Luke Russert). But the easy derision for those public figures probably grows from the sense that music, acting and even reporting all are easy pursuits.

Meanwhile, it’s easy to assume that government is hopelessly complex, Washington is an unnavigable mire and nepotism is value added: This is a callow youth whose entire resume consists of following his or her parents to parties with the right people, but think of how he or she must have learned behind the scenes! It’s a head start!

Thus you can witness unironical celebrations of Rand Paul as an original thinker, despite the fact that his every core policy proposal reads like a distorted Xerox of an older Xerox of his father’s decades of rant-pamphleteering. His first successful electoral campaign apparatus and a lot of his funding core was lifted from his father’s 2008 presidential run. Considering the wealth of original material his father generated, probably the only unique thing Rand Paul has accomplished is plagiarism.

Paul has exceeded his father in accomplishment, while Jeb Bush had been the favoured son until he lost his gubernatorial race in 1994 and his brother won. If Jeb’s moment extends to the 2016 primaries, he will bring with him that brother and their father with national political profiles exceeding his own. All the attendant drama will obfuscate everything that makes a Clinton candidacy just as problematic.

I can hate Jeb Bush for reasons all my own. I can hate potentially spending four-to-eight years telling people on the phone, “No, not Jeff. It’s Jeb, like the ... (exhausted sigh) ... like the President.” I can hate that he and Confederacy-worshipping racists attach a disgusting tradition to the good and noble name my parents gave me as a piss-take about a Watergate co-conspirator. But that’s personal stuff.

What should worry you is that a Bush candidacy or a Clinton candidacy without the other – even with Rand Paul spiraling away in a tornado of loudly whistling racial keywords and self-important obliviousness – might finally provoke a long overdue national discussion about how much we are willing to accept the sons and daughters of official privilege stomping citizens and human beings into irrelevancy. But the moment they face off, that worry disappears in the clamour of the horse race, of equal sides, of sins crossing each other out, of who you got and who’s gonna win?

No “serious Beltway thinker” will condemn one side for doing what the other does. They won’t even consider it a problem, lest it hamper the future careers of their children, Madison (unisex), Avery (unisex) or Hunter (also unisex).

If that happens, there will be no discussion for you. One candidate or another will have to serve your interests, and you’ll have to at least flip the coin to be sure which. What are you going to do, vote for a third party? Sure, throw your vote away.