The talking heads use various metaphors: "It's going to be a hard road ahead."
"We're only entering the fourth quarter."

Well, we're giving the Iraqis back their country, for better or worse. Mostly worse. We've already been over how misbegotten this whole foray was, how it was the wrong war for the wrong reasons, all the blood and treasure lost in the sand.

The hard line rear guard Bush administration apologists claim that, regardless of all the bloodshed, the Iraqi people are better off now than they were under Saddam.

I wouldn't know, since I'm not there on the ground. I have a feeling they don't either. As we stand back and observe the inevitable sectarian score-settling, favoritism, corruption, and the other symptoms of a failing state as the Iraqis--who never thought of themselves as a "people," but a collection of tribes--jockey for power, we'll probably see a strong man emerge.

A populace grown weary of undending violence will turn to him for stability, and gladly trade in whatever trappings of "democracy" we bequeathed upon them at the point of the gun.

The new strong man, after all is said and done, will remind us a lot of Saddam Hussein. Maybe he won't look as ridiculous in a fedora. He'll probably deal with us on oil, because he'll need the money...which was what the whole thing was about in the first place.

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George W. Bush is a lucky guy. He will never be a tragic figure.

A tragic figure is a man who is brought down by some fatal flaw in his own character, and no matter how roundly George W. Bush and his benighted administration may be condemned by history, he will not be brought down, for there is no anguish. His conscience and his sense of his own rectitude remain unshaken.

George Bush has probably never lain awake one night in his life second-guessing a decision he made. This is the advantage of leading "from the gut," rather than by reason.

Gut leadership is strong, swift, sure. Reasoning is more deliberate, and can easily be read as tentative by an electorate that demands immediate action.

George Bush is probably not lying when he says his administration never approved torture. He may be horribly wrong, but he believes he is telling the truth. He has effectively, and enviably, insulated himself from the consequences of his decisions.

If only the rest of us could.

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One school of thought holds that the Obama Administration should investigate the violations of America's moral code that occurred under President Bush's watch: the torturing, the extraordinary renditions, Abu Ghraib, the whole Guantanamo charade. It would be like South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Punish those responsible (read here Cheney, Rummy, and lesser-known figures) so that those who might ponder these acts in the future would know that they couldn't get away with it. Also, prosecution would reaffirm to ourselves what we stand for as a nation.

Another school says let's move on, we have far more pressing problems to face down without getting mired in the sins of the past. Besides, it must have worked, because we didn't get hit again after 9/11.

President Obama, as is his wont, would like to split the difference: indulge in a little garbage-picking after we've addressed the immediate stuff. A pragmatic solution, although my gut says we should hold the malfeasance up to the light, and go wherever an investigation takes us. The national guilt we might feel for turning a blind eye to the dilution of our principles might inoculate us against falling prey to such apathy in the future.

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Not to rain on President Obama's parade, but the American people (at least the current crop) do not weather hardship well. The difference between us and our forebears from the 1930's is that they never had it all that good to start with, so the Great Depression represented, for them, a more severe degree of personal restraint, not a quantum contraction of lifestyle as our current situation demands.

Our history of living high on the credit hog, those big fat cars and houses we really couldn't afford, the flat-screen TVs, the travel, the dining out, are all too vivid in our recent memory. We got used to the taste of prosperity, even if it was just a chimera. We want it back, pronto. A few more months of denial, and we're going to forget that the crash happened on George W. Bush's watch. All we'll think about is that Obama seems to be spinning his wheels at a furious pace, but we're no closer to moving back into our mcmansions.

That'll be right around when things start heating up for the off-year Congressional elections, and the Republicans will be more than happy to point out how little progress we will have made under an all-Democrat government.

How did it all begin? Heck, who will be able to remember that far back?

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When you give the gift of democracy to a people, the vote doesn't always turn out the way you had hoped.

Take the Palestinians (no Henny Youngman jokes, please), who freely and openly elected a government whose central platform plank was the destruction of the State of Israel. Their vote may have been out of desperation, despair or anger, but they made their bed, and the Israelis are now making sure they sleep in it.

It was Hamas, not average Gazan civilians, who fired the rockets into Israel, but the only way Gazans are going to be convinced to change their government is to show them that there is no future for them in supporting their current one.

If this keeps up, Hamas' support in Palestinian public opinion polls may sink even lower than George W. Bush's in American ones. In the regrets department, our two peoples have a great deal in common.

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To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we won't have George W. Bush to kick around anymore.

As we enter the final two-week stretch of this long-running disaster, I realized that throwing tomatoes at W. after he's out would be like speaking ill of the dead, so I'd better take a final (maybe) nasty, small-minded poke at the man who has been the gift that kept on giving for editorial cartoonists.

While I was drawing the cartoon, however, I couldn't help but give a sympathetic tip of the hat to the pathetic picture of a sitting president who is so unpopular that he can't even land a book deal. While Sarah Palin(!) snagged a multi-million-dollar advance for her story, publishers delicately told our swashbuckling hero that he might want to wait a while (read: forever) before penning that memoir. Why would people want to pay good money to read about somebody they'd rather forget, especially in this economy?

Best to just disappear to the Dallas mansion, where his ever-shrinking cadre of hard-core supporters can arrange to have brush dumped in his backyard for him to clear.

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Face it, you blew it. Now--just go away, please. Don't try to put frosting on a failed presidency.

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It's a fitting coda to the utter pointlessness of Bush's invasion of Iraq. Even the people we liberated at the cost of so much human life and treasure are literally hurling their very worst insults at our president as he tries to run his final "victory" lap.

Bush laughed off the incident in his simple-minded way, but it really is tragic that our massive undertaking has come to this. Is there any positive outcome, anything at all, that we can point to? We got rid of Saddam. Great--Iran is taking advantage of the power vacuum, as are the various domestic Iraqi sects and factions he managed to keep in some kind of restless order.

At the very least, we were hoping to leave behind a pro-American client state in the middle of a hostile region.

Instead, the locals are hailing the shoe-thrower as a national hero.

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I guess the best way for a failed presidency to end is not with a bang, but with the long, slow hiss of deflation.

There has been some talk lately that the transition shouldn't take so long. The period between the election and the inauguration used to be even longer, and had something to do with the time it took to go by horseback from the seaboard colonies to the new areas out in Appalachia, to let the locals know who their President was going to be. The only reason there's talk this time is that the nation's condition is so dire.

One does find oneself wishing that if W. just wants to hang around for all the retirement parties, at least he could do the country a favor and get out of the way so that Obama can start fixing things. Every day wasted compounds our plight.

Well, as BHO (is that what the headline writers will call him?) likes to say, "There's only one President at a time."

Somebody should tell Dick Cheney.

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Normally, I don't feel too sorry for members of Congress. They have gold-plated medical and retirement plans, and they get repaid for the cost of their commute, among other things.

This bailout, though, is when they really sweat their salary. They hear from screaming constituents that they should not spend taxpayer money to rescue greedy Wall Street capitalists. At the same time, they're afraid that if they do nothing, Main Street might tank from frozen credit.

Here's their real problem:
Today, they chose to weasel out and bow to the will of the people. But, come November, if the economy really DOES crash because Congress did nothing, how many constituents will remember that they sent an email to their representative telling them to vote "nay?"

About the same number as those who remember that they voted for President Bush four years ago. Like, maybe, five.

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If we needed some kind of a signal that President Bush considers himself in the home stretch, this is probably it. No longer concerned with his polling numbers, which are in the toilet, he has decided it's time to start distributing plums to his friends.

A recent Presidential directive that does not need the approval of Congress now allows his business-friendly regulatory agencies to approve projects (self-regulate!) without getting the necessary clearances from Fish and Wildlife and the EPA. Creatures whose survival stand in the way of progress have long been a bane of the plutocrats, and now we can satisfy ourselves with photos of what they used to look like. Since Vice-President Cheney prefers shooting his cronies to shooting quail, even he probably won't miss the wildlife anymore.

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At first glance, this probably looks like another gag cartoon about how stupid George Bush is. It isn't. That line of humor and commentary was exhausted a long time ago. This cartoon is about the frustratingly powerless position we now find ourselves in when it comes to influencing world events.

Our President must honor the Chinese with his presence at their Olympics because they hold so much of our national debt that not to do so might offend our biggest bankers, regardless of their record on human rights.

And now, thanks to being overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must look on helplessly and cluck, cluck while Russia swallows our staunchest ally in Eastern Europe. Remember when President Bush visited Georgia back in 2006 (you probably don't)? "You Georgians have chosen to stand up for democracy," he said to the cheering multitude (more or less), "and the people of the United States will stand with you."

Now the Georgians, as well as Bush, are learning that he misspoke himself ever so slightly. What he meant to say was, "We will stand by."

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It turns out this President is a lot more adroit with the English language than we thought. A timetable, as it turns out, was a "prescription for surrender." A time horizon, on the other hand, is something we can live with, particularly when a Democratic candidate seems to be gaining traction with a public tired of the war.

Not that it matters that much what he says anymore.

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Listening to the President giving his happy talk speech about the economy the other night first amazed, and then depressed me. It reminded me of his press conference a couple of months ago, when a reporter asked him about four dollar gas. "Four dollar gas?" he retorted, testily. "Where'd you hear that?"

It also reminded me of his father, who was taken through a grocery store as President, and saw his first price scanner. "Wow. I've never seen one of those before. Isn't that something!" Or President Reagan, who, upon entering a McDonald's, said: "How do you order?" (Postscript to this post: I've just been informed that the price scanner story is apocryphal, and has been repeatedly debunked. It is, nevertheless, part of public lore. My question: If you're going to make up a false rumor about somebody, why something so tame? Doesn't begin to compare to blue cocktail dresses in the Oval Office).

I guess it's the President's job to be a cheerleader, even when it clearly makes him look as if he's completely out of touch. What if he'd told us the truth? The stock market would have tanked. Maybe he should have just left well enough alone. Then, at least, we wouldn't be worrying that the country was another Exxon Valdez heading for the rocks with a drunken captain at the tiller. Actually, our situation is worse. The Exxon Valdez was full of oil.

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That we are even discussing this scenario as a real possibility is a testament to Congress' abrogation of its Constitutional role in declaring war, and the President's eagerness to act like the very king the Founding Fathers feared.

Remember the good old days, like 1941, when FDR had to go and make an impassioned case for war before Congress would even go along? And that was after Pearl Harbor, when they actually DID something to us.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall to hear what G.H.W. Bush has to say about how his feckless boy has taken the old man's carefully constructed web of international alliances and understandings, and just blowed 'em all up real good, like a prankster flushing a cherry bomb down the boy's room toilet. Oh, well...that's the next guy's problem.

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What's interesting about the White House's coordinated response to the kiss-and-tell by Scott McClellan is that the inner circle is focusing on his disloyalty and base motives for writing the book, rather than attacking its accuracy. I guess you go with your strengths.

Washington protocol has always held that the rats only desert the ship once it has sunk. McClellan seems to be getting a head start, maybe because he knows that a coming torrent of post-Bushian curtain-lifters will dilute the market for the genre. Let the book deals begin!

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Seventy-two percent of Americans are sick of President Bush. Among the remaining twenty-eight percent are the ones with all the money. One of the more amusing diversions of this campaign will be to watch John McCain's contortions as he tries to embrace the fundraising pig without getting the smell all over him.

I would almost feel sorry for W. (stands for "Who?" in McCain's vocabulary) if his bumblings had not been so destructive. Even his own former flack is stabbing him in the back to sell books ("Et tu, McClellan?"). So much for the vaunted Bush team loyalty.

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Maybe the polar bear will survive until the next administration takes over.

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In all the excitement with the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, gas prices, and the economy going to hell in a handbasket, it's easy to forget there are other things going on in the world that make our issues pale by comparison. It's also easy to forget that there is somebody still occupying the White House, trying to be relevant.

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Yesterday, I heard on National Socialist Radio (a.k.a. NPR), my broadcast news provider of choice, that one in 10 Americans still believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim, despite all the recent brouhaha in the news about his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his inflammatory comments. I checked with our editorial assistant in charge of handling nutty calls from readers, and she said that there had, in fact, been a down-tick lately in the almost three per day she had been fielding, demanding to know why we didn't do an expose on Sheik B. Hussein Obama's "Secret plan to turn America into an Arab country." (That's a direct quote).

Anyway, this got me thinking about the continuing misapprehension on the part of many of our compatriots that the Saudi terrorists on the 9/11 planes were actually Iraqis. I suddenly realized that with a brain-trust like this, the Bush Administration must think we'll believe just about anything they feed us. Well, almost.

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Yesterday, when Vice-President Cheney was asked his reaction to the fact that a majority of Americans thought the Iraq war hadn't been worth it, he answered, "So?"

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