Eight Years On

And so the Bush Administration ends, hopefully not with a bang (though this Gates/designee thing has me really, really spooked), but with a whimper. As Rachel Maddow pointed out tonight, the Strutting Martinet leaves office with a 22% approval rating, and his Dark Lord of a Vice President is expected to show up in a wheelchair tomorrow after allegedly hurting his back today. I myself expect Cheney to show up with a couple of vials of anthrax taped to his wheelchair where they can be easily accessed (a gas mask will, of course, be available underneath the chair for his use.

But if my most tinfoilish fears don't come to pass (and I certainly hope they don't), we will, in 14 hours, be finally, finally, at long last, rid of the Texas Scourge.

I remember after December 12, 2000, when people were saying, "It won't be so bad; the old man will be the one actually running things" -- "the old man" meaning George Sr. Even Cheney seemed reassuring to some. The one part of Kristen Breitweiser's book that I remember most vividly is her depiction of a conversation with her husband, who was killed in the World Trade Center, in which she opined that Bush didn't seem very bright, and her husband Ron reassured her by saying that Cheney would make sure he didn't screw up too badly.

The period from December 2000 through March 2001 wasn't exactly banner here at Casa la Brilliant, what with two human and two pet deaths in the family, one dead car, one job change and one "layoff" that just happened to occur within two weeks of the selection by the Supreme court of George W. Bush as president in a company that stood to make one hell of a lot of money from a Bush presidency. I can't recall one single moment during the last eight years when I haven't been appalled at what this man and his entire Administration have done to our country. For four years I ranted at Mr. Brilliant every morning and every night, until I started this blog on July 31, 2004, because not even that much ranting was enough.

And almost 7000 posts later, here we are, not just on the verge of a new president, but on the verge of an historic moment.

Part of me wishes I were in D.C., but then I think about standing for hours in the cold with no place to pee, and I think about how lucky I am to have this job from which I can't take the time off, and I decide that I will watch it on TV, for even my corporate employer recognizes the import of tomorrow's events enough to open up the network to streaming video so we can watch the inauguration live.

I would love to believe that the smiling, multiracial faces I see on my TV screen who ARE in Washington to watch the event live means that we have really turned a new page. I would love to believe that the kind of overly-conciliatory gestures we've seen out of Barack Obama in the last few weeks are going to disarm the right-wing machine that puts politics ahead of patriotism every damn time; that wants to destroy this administration before it begins. I would love to believe that Barack Obama will find a way to simultaneously harness the good will that Americans bring to this event and punish the criminals who brought us to where we are now, with a mess that he now has to clean up. I would love to believe that this man, who came out of Chicago four years ago to wow a Democratic convention that seemed to already know its candidate would be a disaster, really is going to be able to get us out of Iraq, negotiate peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, put George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld behind bars, get the banks to stop stuffing their pockets with taxpayer cash, and the many other miracles that the shining faces on the Mall seem to hope he can.

I'm too old and too cynical to believe in these kinds of miracles anymore. But I'm more than open to being surprised.

In the last few weeks, it's been harder than ever to write. My job is demanding, and the relentlessly gray and snowy winter here in New Jersey has me showing signs of Seasonal Affective Disorder for the first time. Sometimes I wish I could just crawl under the covers until the baseball season opens. Sometimes I wonder what I'm going to write about if Obama surprises me. I mean, how much about Sarah Palin's vileness should we really pay attention to?

But just as this New Jersey winter will be over at some point, because nature perseveres, so will we persevere. We will continue to write about politics, about weight and aging and workplace issues and outsourcing and whatever else strikes our fancy. Because it's what we do.