The Us Derangement Syndrome

As usual, Still-President Junior Bush disappointed in his last press conference Monday morning. Too bland to be interestingly psychotic like Nixon; too stupid to be sad about all the unnecessary death he has caused like LBJ; so clueless he makes Reagan look like he knew what he was doing – it was and is impossible to get an emotional handle on this most vapid and vacant of presidential hand-puppets. And, yet, we hold out to the bitter end for any flash of reality-recognition from this dimmest of bulbs. Come on – couldn’t he at least pretend he "gets it", just once, just for us?

Alas, no. Bush waltzed through his last presser without a care in the world, with one eye on his script and another on the clock ticking down his long-sought Final Days.

As usual with Bush, insights were few, but it is amazing how reactive (reactionary?) Bush admitted to being. Making excuses to his ignorantly simplistic economic base for abandoning his supposed "free-market principles" (principles...Bush...HAH!) by agreeing to the various bailouts of the financial industry, Bush yammered "well, if you were sitting there and heard that the depression could be greater than the Great Depression, I hope you would act too". Faced with a decent question about his decimation of America’s moral standing in the world by all manner of international lawlessness, he blames it on...wait for it..."Do you remember what it was like right after September the 11th around here?" Well, no, tell us, President Dipshit, what was it like around here? Do you think maybe that’s why Bin Laden still sits in his cave laughing all day long? Push a button with Bush and anything can happen as he flails around trying to fix his many failings by making everything ten times worse.

And so, since Bush has apparently passed up his last opportunity to get on his knees and beg us all for forgiveness (even if he did, the answer would be "no forgiveness for you" anyway), we have to look to others on which to take out our frustrations with the Bush Disaster. I suggest we look to ourselves. After all, we all let this happen, in one way or another:

• Ralph Nader voters let it happen in 2000 when they selfishly insisted on some kind of impossible purity and took enough votes from Al Gore in Florida and other states to make it the close call that it was.
• We let it happen in 2000, when we allowed Bush to take office after democracy was hijacked by judicial fiat in the Supreme Court.
• We let it happen in 2001 when Bush stood on the pile at the World Trade Center and grandstanded over the wreckage and the dust of the dead at his feet.
• We let it happen when Bush rolled the Congress into passing his tax cuts for the rich and the Patriot Act.
• We let Rumsfeld and Cheney happen.
• We let it happen when Bush invaded and occupied Iraq in the Stupidest War in American history.
• We let it happen when too many of us turned our nose up at John Kerry in 2004. If there is one thing this country needed for its own self-respect, it was to make Junior Bush a one-term president. His getting another four years was inexcusable.
• We let it happen when Bush went to Jackson Square in New Orleans after Katrina for a TV show and took the lights out of town with him.
• We let Guantanamo happen.
• We let the politicization of the Justice Department happen.
• We let Blackwater happen.
• We let random warrantless wiretapping happen.
• We let (fill in your favorite Bush Disaster here) happen.

Sure, some fought the good fight, opposed it all, organized, litigated, blogged, etc. But it wasn’t enough, now, was it? The radical Bushies still got away with it. Their contributors got more than their money’s worth. There was a time during the Bush years that the Constitution hung by a thread, almost falling into the abyss of mad power grabs. The Bushies – those of them that don’t stay behind to poison the federal bureaucracy – will leave town with their heads high and their pockets full of loot. And, glad to see them go, we’ll let them, without the prosecution and the jail time they deserve.

There were many times in the past eight years we could have stopped the madness; through Congress, in the courts or in the streets. Bush’s name will always be on the history of these hard years, but the blame is – or should be – on us.