Three sixty three

On January 20, 2009, 363 days from now, assuming W doesn't pull a Musharraf and cancel elections, we will have a new president.

This president will inherit a pointless, endless, catastrophic, ruinously expensive war, a DOJ packed with religious loonies, an exhausted and dispirited armed forces, an astronomic national debt, and a completely polarized Congress.

Oh, and we will have lost 8 years on the global warming front, with the tipping point closer than the most pessimistic scientists have imagined.

How could this have happened? We know that the 2000 and 2004 elections were both stolen, but how could they have been close enough in the first place that they could be stolen? How could a pack of thugs with an admiration for the principles of Nazism, who treat Orwell not as a cautionary tale but as a blueprint, have gotten into power in the land of the free and home of the brave?

I don't know, and I've had outrage fatigue for so long that I can't really be coherent on the subject.

Thanks to the spineless Democratic majority we elected in 2006, who instead of taking the mandate from the people have taken impeachment off the table, we can but count the days.

I hope the rest of the world can forgive us. I know they can feel us wince every time W struts around or opens his mouth in public. The shock of 2004 - you mean we didn't send the idiot back to his village? - is freshened with each new embarrassment, each new outrage.

363 days until the Worst President Ever, the man with the inverse Midas touch, the frat boy who carefully takes an opposite path of what both Bill Clinton and his father would do (and is thus always perfectly wrong), will go back to Crawford. With any luck we'll be able to forget about him and perhaps keep out of our minds that the deaths of a million Iraqis don't seem to perturb his sleep.

And we'll get to clean up his mess.