The Long Goodbye

The 43rd President of the United States of America gave his farewell address to the nation last night. It was an implausible list of absurdities and a tirade of triumphs out of tragedy. In short, George W. Bush has decided that he will spend the rest of his life believing his own bullshit. Not only did he fail to catch Bin Laden, he started a war in a country that didn’t attack us at all, thus destabilizing the most volatile region in the world. We are now in a global recession that could see us spiraling back to the late 70’s gas lines or worse, the early 30’s bread lines. But our “misunderestimated” leader gave us this wonderful tautology to ponder when thinking back on his Presidency:

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made, but I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

Yes … wait, what the hell does that even mean? As the Commander in Chief isn’t the implication of making decisions right there in the job title? I mean … is that really what he wants us to think about? He was willing to do his job, just not correctly? As Chris Matthews said last night, it reminded him of schools these days when everyone gets a pass for trying. Well, sorry, but fucking up our country so thoroughly and undeniably is the kind of test that needs to have a pass/fail grading system and sorry G.W., but history definitely grades on a bell curve.

In the final analysis, this was one of the worst Presidencies in our national memory. Even Andrew Jackson’s pigs racing through the white house would have been preferable to this, as many have said, our national nightmare. We reap what we sow and just because you are a good Christian doesn’t mean you have any business running the country. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice that he quoted Thomas Jefferson as he waved a hearty “fuck you” to us all, the irony being that Jefferson was a very big proponent of the separation of Church and State.

‘President Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”’

Well, the dreams of the future are definitely without Bush, but not without his horrible blundering mistakes. He wasn’t so much a President as an organ-grinder’s monkey. In this case, the organ-grinders were Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. If the organ-grinder doesn’t do his job and keep his monkey trained, he does things that can get kids killed. The monkey will be put down and the organ-grinder goes to jail. That would be my “dream of the future” for Mr. Bush his organ-ginders. Sadly, the kids are still dead.