"MY FELLOW AMERICANS, our long national nightmare is over," said the president who followed the first United States president to resign from office. Those words were spoken by Gerald Ford after being sworn in as president in August 1974. He was talking about the mess his predecessor, Richard Nixon, had left the country in following two years embroiled in the Watergate scandal. Both were Republicans.
I can almost guarantee that Democrat Barack Obama will not criticize George W. Bush in his inaugural address other than to express gratitude to his predecessor and disagreement with the results, if not Bush's intentions. Barack Obama would never say what I'm about to say:
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our idiot president, George Bush, is history. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a different declaration, "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires" that I should "declare the causes which impel" me to call the president an idiot. Let me count the ways.
He lied to us. He knew he'd get caught. He tried to bluff his way through. He sent us to war against a sovereign foreign power based on a non-existent threat he argued relentlessly was imminent to convince our nation and the world his actions were just. Future historians will see George Bush for what he was, a pride-obsessed tragedian within a Shakespearean-Fruedian drama who sought to avenge his wronged father, Bush the Elder, who lost a presidential election after going to war for the right reasons against an obnoxious dictator.
On this twisted stage Saddam Hussein was the equivalent of Hamlet's evil uncle, but George Bush was no tortured Hamlet. He did not brood so much as posture and sneer. He did not doubt. And so we went to war for all the wrong reasons. And thousands and thousands and thousands died, including 4,200 Americans, who would not have died if George Bush had not been president.
Why was he an idiot? Because he failed the test of non-idiocy. He didn't get it. He still doesn't get it. He leaves office with minor regrets about a "Mission Accomplished" banner rather than taking responsibility for launching the still unaccomplished mission. After six years of war America has four times as many troops in Iraq, a country we shouldn't have invaded, than in Afghanistan, a country we should have invaded. Since New Year's day almost twice as many American troops have died in Afghanistan (10) than in Iraq (6). And 9/11 terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden is still a free man. That's the American reality on the day before George Bush leaves office, the final day of our long national nightmare.
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