It all seemed so harmless back in the year 2000. We had just gotten over the Y2K scare, and everything seemed hunky-dory. The Internet was changing the world, the stock market was raging with these dot-com companies, and we had another election we didn't care that much about. The VP Gore was about as entertaining as a long dead stick, and the hick from Texas Bush didn't seem to be able to complete a sentence with over six words without stuttering. These were the choices to lead us into the new millennium. How could you choose wrong when it didn't seem like you could choose right? I cast my non-vote for Nader, and Bush won Florida and the election. Eight years later, history has decided.

Whoa boy, whoduhthunkit? We went from being the greatest nation on the planet, admired & awed & intimidating to being the crumbling evil empire who deserves every bit of its downfall. Eight years is a long time for any human to endure.

I spent most of the first four years bemoaning the many wrong moves of President W. He's an idiot, he's going to war in the wrong place, he's lying, he's giving no-bid war contracts to the VPs company, he doesn't know what he's doing, and on & on & on until I got tired of talking about it. We'll be done with him in 2004, I said. It doesn't matter who the Democrats throw up, we'll vote for them out of default. Um, I think it's fair to say I was the idiot.

Bush (or the people in charge of him) knew what FDR knew. America doesn't switch presidents in the middle of a war, no matter how botched the job. The result of the 2004 election was the same, thanks to a state called Ohio this time. Kerry didn't know what to do with swift boats. Whoduhthunkit?

I admit that I got a little patriotic myself after 9-11. I contemplated getting an American flag after the towers came down. I settled for a New Mexican flag, and I still stand by my decision. I had never seen a country get so country. It wasn't only our president who was a hick, it was the whole lot of us. Everyone starting saying all these stupid ideas of what we should do with Iraq, what we should do with gays, what we should do with all the brown people, what we should do with everyone but ourselves. I think it's because each and everyone of us thought we were at least as equally smart as our president. You know what? We were.

A lot of serious issues came up during the Bush Years. Terrorism, immigration, social security, space missions to Mars, and we conquered none of them. Not even close. Anything that improved while Bush was in office occurred in spite of him. Stem cell research, AIDS improvement in Africa, was he actually taking credit for that stuff? All Bush did was throw money at the military and his two wars. He went after Osama bin Laden until he got tired of it and settled for Saddam Hussein. If you can't find the master mind of the biggest terrorist attack in US history, you might as well settle some old scores.

I really tried to not bitch about Bush as much during his second term. I still can't believe half the country could find a way to vote for the bungling boob, but they did. What ever happened for the next four years was our fault because we knew exactly what we were getting.

What did we get? Four more years of war & torture, standardized testing in schools that punished instead of rewarded, Katrina embarrassment (George Bush does not like black people!), and oh yeah, the ultimate plunging of our economy. What was our President's solution to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression? Throw money at the stock market. If you gave me $700 billion to play the market, I bet I could really clean up. Or at least only lose about $200 billion of it. To Bush's credit, I did get paid about $450 from the government during his eight years. That's a little over fifty bucks a year to tolerate the worst administration of my lifetime. I guess that's not too bad. It's like he was a distant relative sending me a couple belated Christmas checks.

President Bush said history will decide how well he did, but I don't think it will take history very long to give its verdict. I can't think of a single positive thing that he directly caused, unless you consider war positive, but honestly, we could have even done that better. It is well understood by all Americans, Democrats, Republicans & others, that this has been an awful president, and his popularity polls reflect that. Just because you don't pay attention to polls doesn't mean they are not true.

Maybe he'll pull a Jimmy Carter, and we'll all like him better after the fact. I do not count on this. I think he'll slink away to north Dallas and Crawford and serve out his exile in Texas where he deserves to be.

Good riddance, President Bush. The country ultimately despised you so much that the majority of Americans believed a black man could do the job better. Now that's living in historic times! The world already likes us better and Obama hasn't even taken office. We're in the economic shitter right now, but for some reason, we have hope. Maybe, just maybe, we were supposed to go through the last eight years just to prove we could even be better than we were, oh so long ago, in the year 2000.

President No. 43 is leaving the building. Bring on 44!

Chris Jungle does not pull his punches.