Chris Satullo: Goodbye Bush
It’s over (or nearly) – eight years of incompetence and incoherence masquerading as down-home patriotism.
It's over (or nearly) – eight years of incompetence and incoherence masquerading as down-home patriotism.
It's over – an Oval Office dripping with contempt for scientific expertise.
It's over – a ruling clique arrogantly confident that they can make the world believe the sky is orange merely by saying so.
It's over – the scandal that the home of the Bill of Rights would embrace the torture of human beings as its official policy.
It's over - a self-righteous, ill-informed exceptionalism that has left American foreign policy in tatters.
It's over – having to listen to Karl Rove prattle about a "permanent Republican majority."
It's over – watching the federal budget sink ever deeper into a red sea, thanks to the wacky Laffer delusion's grip on the nation's fiscal policy.
It's over –having to worry that the next new Supreme Court justice will share Antonin Scalia's extreme, ahistorical take on the Constitution.
It's over – watching the planet warm as the CEO of its most powerful and profligate nation twiddles his thumbs.
It's over – thousands of talented, experienced federal workers trooping out the doors, disheartened by working for a boss who clearly didn't want them to succeed in their appointed missions.
It's over – eight years of the devastating delusion that businesses can be left to police themselves, with the alleged magic of markets somehow protecting the public interest.
It's over – listening to a president whose definitions of patriotism and bipartisanship both come down to "everyone agrees with me, without complaint."
It's over – an administration that uses Orwellian tricks to disguise the true intent of its policies.
It's over – a White House that claims a nearly monarchical exemption from the useful oversight set up by the Constitution.
It's over – the era when Fox News served an unofficial propaganda arm of the ruling party.
The new ruling majority elected today will make its own mistakes, overreach in its own ways, succumb at times to the temptations of arrogance.
It also will have to foreswear, or at least delay, many of its fondest goals and promises – because of the urgency of cleaning up the myriad messes left by the Bush wrecking crew.
But, if it shows any sense at all, it will not approach the arrogance, willful ignorance and incompetence that we have endured as a nation for nearly eight years.
And for that, let us give thanks as this thought-it-would-never-get-here Election Day draws to a close.