05 Nov 2008 0830H

In retrospect

it is hard to believe that four years, four horrible years have passed since the last election. President-elect Obama’s rise to the highest office in the land has been nothing less than meteoric. At this time it may be worth taking a look back to the last election. In another life, on another blog, four years ago, I wrote, prior to voting:

Dear Mr Bush:

Frankly I didn’t like you from the beginning, and I didn’t like your rival Al Gore either since the track record of the Dems in the second Clinton term had become increasingly awful. So I followed my conscience and voted for Nader, even though he really didn’t run a campaign and spent his time talking about his own ideas. Since my expectations of you were negative when you assumed office, it came as no surprise to find you performing accordingly.

Sure, after 9/11, while the world was glued to their televisions and radios for that week, you had my admittedly cautious attention, but it was soon clear in the run-up to Afghanistan in October of ‘01, and Iraq in the spring of ‘03, that your advisors had led you and this country, either by design or by accident, onto a path towards disaster, a path I felt so wrong I was forced, for the first time in several years, to take personal action in time, words, and deeds to protest vociferously against it.

Mr Bush, you have failed to dismantle al-Qaeda and have allowed Osama bin Laden to escape justice. You have placed our children needlessly into harm’s way. You have scorned the advice of our nation’s best as well as our oldest and most trusted allies, counselors, and neighbors from abroad. You have abandoned your stewardship of our country’s financial, legal, environmental, and physical well-being. You have endangered the well-being of our new colonies, Afghanistan and Iraq, through your lack of vision, and potentially many others as well.

If I had the power, I’d send you and your cabal of palace eunuchs to Iraq in order to fulfill the national duties you all shirked in Viet Nam. Fortunately for you, I do not have the power to send you to a sand-scorched desert camp to be harassed day and night by small arms fire; I do not have the power to strap you without body armor inside an expensive Humvee to be perforated like swiss cheese by a homemade roadside bomb.

I do however possess the power to vote, and, tomorrow afternoon, I will join millions of fellow souls in using it to send you back to your beloved ranch in Crawford, where I am hoping you will finally stay put, far away from the nation’s corridors of power, and where you and your bloated, festering lot will trouble neither our land nor any other ever again.

I am praying for the intercession and guidance of the Ancestors for you and for the rest of our country in this painfully difficult and crucial transition period. May they bless our mother Amerika.

And then, of course, came the morning after. To show you how far we have come:

Ohhhhh ;-( . . . it’s the morning after, when you wake up, look cautiously sideways at who you wound up with last night, it’s not the person you thought it was, and you begin to quietly weep. Yes, yes. But you made your bed, so you have to lie in it. And as we hastily, quietly wrestle our clothes on to begin the slow, painful walk of shame in the grey morning light, we know it’s just a matter of time before the consequences of reckless desperation and going without protection begin to show.

Mark my words: America, your short political memory being what it is, you’ll yet rue the name of George W. Bush. Bushes, you haven’t licked this Viet Nam thing yet. Everyone else, stop, stop, stop. Just stop whingeing and hand-wringing and get organized. But pace yourself — this is going to be an exciting four years. AFAIC, the right wing just sealed its fate.

Now, sure as the sun will cross the sky, the lie is over. The long national nightmare is over. Now we can turn our attention to national reconstruction. The challenges are ridiculously difficult. But I feel confident we have entrusted our future at last to the right hands. Things could hardly have gotten worse.

I feel hopeful. For the first time in many years.

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