Our Long, Self-Inflicted National Nightmare Comes to an End

George W. Bush has never achieved anything worthwhile on his own.

Everything he has gotten in this world has been handed to him.

He smoked, snorted, and drank himself into insensibility for years.

He was a failure in any business venture where his family didn't intercede on his behalf. He moved up the ladder despite one screw-up after another. 

He was a worthless governor of a big state where the Lt. Governor has much of the real authority and the state legislature only meets every other year. He claimed credit for other people's good ideas. He sucked up to his cronies and steered favors toward them. He was indifferent to the poor, despite his rhetoric.

He was nominated for president in 2000 only because of his name, not for any "qualifications" he had. 

He "won" because the national media hated his opponent and lied about him at every opportunity. Bush was no slouch in spreading lies himself. He got "elected" by stealing Florida, with the help of right wing thugs and conservative ideologues on the Supreme Court. It was a right-wing coup d'etat.

He ignored every warning about terrorism. When it struck, he cynically exploited it for his own political benefit.

His Administration's corruption spread its tentacles into every area of public life. No-bid contracts proliferated. His friends and allies got fat and rich off of taxpayer money.

There is no area of American life that he did not injure, either through deliberate action or neglect. The environment has been harmed, the economy has crashed, and contempt for our legal traditions has become epidemic. 

He started a war in Afghanistan that needed to be fought and one in Iraq that didn't. The Iraq War was based on lies, manipulated intelligence, propaganda, and horrifyingly bad judgment. There should have been a national uprising in America when all of this became apparent. There wasn't.

Through it all, millions of complacent Americans looked the other way or were misled by a groveling, lapdog press corps that went out of its way to denigrate his opponents and elevate this shocking mediocrity to "heroic" status. And a weak willed Democratic Party didn't show enough courage to stop his outrages when they should have.

Now, finally, eight years overdue, the worst president and the worst vice president in our nation's history are leaving. They leave a country that is on the ropes, one which has finally come to see them for what they are. They're crawling out of office, hated, despised, jeered at, held in contempt, ridiculed, and damned.

Let the curtain finally come down on this sick, perverse melodrama that appealed to every ugly and bigoted instinct in its supporters.

Now, at long last, led his wretched pathetic administration end, and let him fade into the obscurity from which he should never have been rescued.