Happy Endings?

There was a feeling that every high school student can relate to...that moment when the bell rings on the last day of school before summer vacation. All the pages in the notebook can be safely discarded, pens can be left uncapped and pencils can remain unsharpened. All the assignments that were left undone, or under done, were rendered completely unimportant with one last tick of the clock.

As the clock struck noon today, George Bush has tossed his notebook in the air, and left the papers to flutter down with no rhyme nor reason, the pages left for someone else to pick up, perhaps reassemble, or maybe to simply discard. For our 43rd president, he gets an exit with full honors bestowed upon our commanders in chief, popular or not. He can clear brush or sip lemonade from the hammock in the back yard while others try to sift through the scattered remains of his tenure in office and try to salvage what is worth saving, while noting what needs repairing. It will be a tedious process, and it might take half of President Obama’s first term just to make sense of it all.

He can count himself lucky. His “work” is done, and for the most part, he will not be held to account for the damage he has wrought on our nation, and its standing in the world. If one needs reminders of his popularity, how about being booed at the inauguration, or being serenaded to “Na-Na-Na-Na, Hey Hey Goodbye”. Ouch. Or how about the striking pose captured on film as the new inhabitants of the White House waved to the departing helicopter? “....have fun storming the castle!” One can only wonder what George and Laura Bush talked about as they returned to their Texas compound...I am sure the last few weeks have been filled with opportunity for reflection, so this was likely more of an exhale. The weight of the world, quite literally lifted from their backs, as they began the rapturous climb skyward in the military helicopter.

Former Presidents face the new burden of using their status for some good around the world. Jimmy Carter was perhaps one of the most effective ex-Presidents, despite his status as a mediocre chief executive. The elder President Bush, along with Bill Clinton teamed up in a true odd couple sort of way to raise funds on behalf of those impacted by the tsunami in Sri Lanka and Hurricane Katrina. I am hopeful that the younger President Bush finds some cause that will allow him to improve his legacy which at present seems sort of disheveled. However, I will not be surprised if he opts to simply ride off into the sunset. As the inauguration of President Obama grew near, President Bush became a sort of tragic figure...misunderstood, at least in his mind, unloved, and unwanted. They ironically rolled Vice President Cheney out in a wheel chair....they could no longer even limp out of town. As a nation, we take just a moment to wave goodbye. We cannot spare a lot of time, for there is much to do, and not a minute to waste.

Your Services are No Longer Required

Dear President Bush,

After 8 years of service, it has come to the attention of the electorate that your service to this nation is no longer required. Though clearly the duration of your service is at its natural end, you should know that were that not the case, and were you eligible to remain in your current post, we would still seek to end your relationship with us, the American people. We have been all but unable to find anyone who still offers any support for your methods or affection for your once endearing folksiness. We hereby seek to terminate your contract with this nation for cause and with prejudice.

Furthermore, should you look to use this position as a springboard to other posts, we think it best that you not call on us for a reference or letter of recommendation. Simply put, your work has been shoddy, and it appears that you have difficulty completing any task on which you embark. It will take your successor considerable time and valuable energy and resources to tie up the loose ends you leave behind. Were there any way it could be done, it would be a fitting servitude to ask that you clean up these various messes, but there is simply no longer sufficient resources to risk having you further bungle things.

It appears that your staff has not served you well either. Your second in command appears to have ruffled the feathers of nearly every person he has influence over or contact with, and in general, the entire lot of them do not take criticism or advice particularly well. Though difficult to prove, it also appears that a number of them lied....to you, to the media, and to their employers. It is frankly difficult to find instances where they were honest for any stretch of time, or in any important context. You should be advised that, for the most part, it is our intent to dismiss them along with you.

It always seemed as if things were done “your way or the highway” and frankly, that approach has not yielded much fruit. As a word of advice...get some help, literally and figuratively. It seems that unresolved issues with your father have tripped you up on an occasion or two, and so you may want to talk to someone about that. Professionally, you seem at times over matched, and the job appears to have grown beyond your abilities. Your crisis management has been uneven at best, with occasional glimmers of success, offset by abject failures, and repercussions of these stumbles are with us to this day.

We understand that our displeasure with your performance might come as a shock. Your subordinates have, alas, shielded you from many realities. In your next endeavor, you may want to consciously involve yourself with people of divergent opinions from your own. You may wind up learning something from them, and their input may save you from duplicating the same types of missteps taken in your current position. It appears that you treat dissent and disagreement as somehow inappropriate or dangerous. You may want to brush up on the history of the nation you have been serving. Dissent has led to some positive changes. In fact, your successor’s rise to power can be traced not indirectly to people that chose to speak out against injustice some 40 years ago.

In closing, we’d like to request that you not do anything any of us will regret in the future. Leave the silver in the cabinet, keep the special pen used for pardoning safely stored and do not consider using it. Help yourself to as many paperclips as you wish to have, and the stationary with your name on it is yours to keep. Try not to start any more wars, and this includes border incursions contemplated without provocation. It has been publicized that you will seek to (further) undermine clean air and water standards as you head toward the door. Better to concentrate on putting all the picture frames into proper cardboard boxes. Suspend any further torture activities, in any of the prisons, known and unknown, that you are operating. Please be forthcoming with your successor, and pray that your misdeeds do not lead to more than a simple dismissal.

Though your rent is paid in full through January 20th of 2009, there would not be much resistance should you abdicate your position well in advance of that. Feel free to travel. There are many folks in distant lands that would love to have a word with you. You are hereby encouraged to see what all the fuss is about.

You might also want to begin work on your presidential library. Surely many institutions would be happy to house this facility. You will need to rustle up some books and papers to put in there. It is assumed that most of the documents have been shredded or placed in the secure location along with your vice-president. Someday, these will come to light, and there doubtless will be a lot of folks that want to peruse them as they describe exactly what this nation opted to do to itself over the last 8 years.

We appreciate your cooperation during this delicate time, and we look forward to seeing you at the swearing out ceremony that, in some circles, has already begun on an ad hoc basis.

Regards,

The Citizens of the United States of America
(your employers whom you sought to actively ignore, deceive, and embarrass)

McCain't

Where is the outrage? Back when the Republican Party handed their nomination to John McCain, I thought they were brilliant. John McCain had a well regarded record as a “tweener”, not closely tied to the ridiculous far right, and enough of a centrist to actually pull votes from the Democrats in a year that Republicans are radioactive. Now, as his campaign twitches involuntarily in the last throes of life, there are many in his own party that want to condemn his campaign staff, his tactics, his running mate....really everything about him....and yet, doesn’t that all but miss the point?

John McCain will not be president of these United States in 2008 because George W. Bush was the worst president in the history of our republic. Do we really need to let history be the judge? Can’t we pretty much close the book on this guy now? Has anything he has done as president left this country better off? Has he succeeded in any small facet of leadership? The failures are underscored more heavily now as we anticipate him riding off into the sunset....during the financial crisis, he has been all but invisible, appearing every now and again to mumble some nonsensical drivel and then sneak away to play pong or Pac Man or whatever he does with his time these days. Then this weekend, he finds time and reason to bomb Syria. Has he no restraint? Do we need to relieve him of his duties before January 20th just to make sure he does no more serious harm?

I will admit when he came to power, my expectations were very low, I felt he was an unintelligent man, with no vision and no real reason to be president other than it was a job others said he should pursue. To his credit, he far exceeded my worst fears.

But there were many that liked this guy...enough in fact to re-elect him (WOW! How crazy is that given a few years of context?) I can assure you I had nothing to do with his re-election...but I am constantly surprised by the lack of outrage by his supporters, and by the nation in general. If we impeached Bill Clinton for the rather trivial offense of a misdeed of the flesh, what might the punishment for a president who led us into two wars (one unnecessary and contrived), and who failed to act responsibly to pay for said wars in a logical matter. He ran up a debt heretofore unimaginable under a Republican administration. We could talk about all the other blunders and missteps made by the administration, but the list would take up far too much space.....and the real bottom line is that despite the simmering dislike in the form of low approval ratings and such, where were the folks on the right now calling for McCain’s advisors to be fired? They let Bush slide, and now they act surprised by the results. The Republicans brought this on themselves because they let their clueless leader lead them to the edge of a cliff and like lemmings they followed right along over the edge. Republicans don’t believe in dissent. They find it un-American. And now, they find their quiet compliance to be a ticket out of Washington. A little outrage folks, might have kept you around....

The Calendar Says "October"

The leaves are starting to turn...the night air is cool, and though the daytime sun is still warm, it lacks the vigor of summer. No doubt about it, just a few pages are left on the calendar, until the end of the year and it got me to thinking....just as we near the end of the year, I wonder, where are we on the ‘calendar of our nation’? Near the end? Just getting started? Are we truly still in an unending state of “Morning in America”?

Surely if a politician suggested otherwise, his or her career would be over. No one can openly admit that perhaps America’s best days are behind us. But it still seems worth considering. Was the 20th century the American century? If so, do we get two centuries?...in a row? And if this is not our century, whose is it?, and what does that mean for us? American’s have a name for second place.....losers.

Ronald Reagan told us, with enough assurance that we believed him, that our best days were yet to come. As the 20th century wound down, we had successfully fought two world wars, and our economy was the envy, if not the engine, of the world. We were riding a pretty good winning streak. Sure there had been stumbles. Vietnam was surely not our finest hour, and then there was Nixon, and Agnew, and Kent State. But there was also Apollo, the Beach Boys and Willie Mays. It was pretty bold to predict that even better days lie ahead.

And yet, to say otherwise implies...what? Decline? Tough times? The end of US dominance in the world economy and as the only remaining superpower....shudder the thought! Even writing the words raises the hair on the back of my neck. Nope, we Americans will accept only top billing...but I wonder what happens when the rest of the world no longer sees us that way....self delusion can only last so long. What was Reagan saying when he said our best days were in front of us? Perhaps he meant the Clinton Administration....those were pretty good days until the whole “bang the intern” thing got rolling...and even while we considered semen stained dresses and the meaning of the word “the” , the economy was good, our stature in the world was never better, and we were number one...no one argued with that! And besides...the bad stuff all had to do with consenting adults having sex...how bad is that, really?

I wonder where we are today, on the calendar of our nation. Surely we are well past January. If we consider Reagan’s Morning in America; I guess we were all sipping our national cup of coffee (Starbucks one can only assume) and still anticipating the warmth of the sunny days ahead....it must have been about February or March, and clearly the calendar had many pages left on it. So, where are we now?

Clearly, the Clinton days felt like spring. Sex was everywhere....from the White House to the home front! I was a father for the first and second time. Everything seemed to have a fresh coat of paint. Cars were new and shiny, and clearly a drive in a convertible was not out of the question. We were like a nation of colts, finally gaining control of our long, strong legs. We were magnificent. I’d guess it was April in America

Where are we now? Do we feel magnificent? What has the Bush Administration left us with other than a bunch of pages ripped hastily from the calendar to go along with all the bills scattered about and left for us to pay. Is that what the last 8 years have been? An accelerated aging that robbed us of the sweetness of summer...the cold lemonade enjoyed under a bounteous apple tree. Did we somehow trade in what could have been the glorious days and warm summer nights of May and June, for the bitter-sweetness of August and September. We never bothered to go skinny dipping in the pond or run naked through the woods with our friends. Instead we covered our bodies ashamedly as we aged, and wrinkled and instead of fireworks on the 4th of July, we got missiles and bombs over Baghdad. Instead of laying beside a pool, we hide our skin from the sun, fearful that the broken down ozone layer would not protect us from the cancerous rays...we lie awake fearful of enemies both real and imagined....We long for morning, but we know the nights are getting longer.

Now we await the harvest of the seeds planted over the last few years. Will the harvest be bountiful? Will we have enough food to eat? Will there be any left over to share with those less fortunate? Could we use some of the crop to trade with others to get supplies we might need. It seems uncertain just now. It just seems that there are only a page or two left on the calendar, and that seems pretty scary.

The chill in the air...could it really be just the last shiver as spring yields to summer, or is it perhaps the warning of winter oncoming?

Yep.

From Mike Allen’s Playbook at www.politico.com/playbook/:

“Sen. John McCain on Wednesday blasted President Bush for building a mountain of debt for future generations, failing to pay for expanding Medicare and abusing executive powers, leveling his strongest criticism to date of an administration whose unpopularity may be dragging the Republican Party to the brink of a massive electoral defeat. 'We just let things get completely out of hand,’ he said of his own party's rule in the past eight years. In an interview with The Washington Times, Mr. McCain lashed out at a litany of Bush policies and issues that he said he would have handled differently as president, days after a poll showed that he began making up ground on Sen. Barack Obama since he emphatically sought to distance himself from Mr. Bush in the final debate. ‘Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,’ Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio. ‘Those are just some of them,’ he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter.”

Hard to add anything to that assessment...Thanks Senator McCain and to all the congressional Republicans for providing such great oversight during the Bush years. As you wander around looking for new jobs, maybe you should consider including on your resume that for the last 8 years you leaned on a shovel smoking cigarettes while our democracy crumbled.