Is there life after Bush?

We've been hating him forever, but he's leaving. Now we have to decide what to do with the rest of our lives.

By Gary Kamiya

Feb. 20, 2007 | Hating George W. Bush sometimes feels like a full-time job. I get up in the morning, open the paper, and it's Bush World. His ruinous handiwork is all over the place, whether it's Putin threatening to start a new Cold War, another Neanderthal anti-Enlightenment skirmish in the U.S. or some fresh hell in Baghdad. I turn on the TV and there he is, uttering reality-averse platitudes while mangling the English language in his best frat-boy twang. And then there's the Internet, where my bookmarked band of rhetorical assassins stir facts and commentary about his wretched tenure into a damning cocktail that I happily imbibe.

It isn't surprising that Bush is deeply implanted in my brain -- when you're the worst president in modern history, you tend to work your way into people's psyches. But it's still a little strange. I've been forced to deal with this wretched president for so long that hating him has virtually become part of my identity.

This is, as the hippies used to say, a lot of bad karma. To tell the truth, I don't know if I actually hate Bush. I'm not sure if you can hate someone you don't actually know, and I'm not even sure if I really hate anyone. But I definitely feel every other negative emotion you can imagine toward him -- anger, contempt, fear, disgust, outrage -- so let's go ahead and call it hate. And millions of other Americans are in the same boat.

But this is all going to change. Pretty soon, we won't have Bush to kick around anymore. And I've started wondering: What are we going to do then?

The first thing, of course, is celebrate. That giant sucking sound you hear coming from San Francisco on Jan. 20, 2009, will be the contents of a very expensive bottle of wine going down my gullet. And trust me, I won't be alone. There will be be more partying on that night than during a Roman Saturnalia.

If form holds, a host of pious pundits will step forward to bleat that this celebration is "mean-spirited." These are the same smarmy aunties who decry Bush hatred as "extreme" and "obsessive" and fatuously intone that Bush "appears to have driven some people on the left crazy." Rubbish. Those of us who will be celebrating will be giving thanks for the end of a president who launched a totally unnecessary and disastrous war, declared a radical new doctrine of limitless presidential power, threw gasoline on what was once a small jihadi fire, severely weakened the economy, approved of torture and domestic spying, let bin Laden get away, accelerated the destruction of the environment, bashed science, engaged in vicious illegal vendattas against his opponents, winked at gay-bashing, handed out tax breaks to billionaires, lied constantly, made the U.S. hated around the world, and did it all while talking loudly in public on his personal hotline to Jesus. And that's just the short list.

What's not to celebrate?

Maybe we Bush-haters are extreme and obsessive. But Bush made us this way. We didn't want to hate the guy -- he left us no choice. And the respectable people calling for us to calm down and go to our rooms are the same good Germans who somehow didn't notice he was taking us down the garden path to hell.

But after the high-fives, the partying, the Red Auerbach victory stogies and the cries of "Thank God almighty, we are free at last" have faded from the land, we'll be faced with a whole new landscape -- not just political but psychological. And I suspect we're going to have a serious Bush hangover.

First, of course, there's going to be one hell of a mess to clean up. Whoever replaces Bush is going to face a daunting array of national and international problems. God only knows what will be happening in Iraq by then; whether or not U.S. troops are out, we could be watching a genocide. The rest of the Middle East could easily have degenerated further. Radical Islamists are still going to be planning terror attacks. The global environment will not magically heal itself. Our economy, propped up with Chinese money and crippled with an enormous deficit, could have turned south. The unhealthy schism between red-state and blue-state views of the world could have gotten wider. And there are all those festering problems that Bush's world-scale idiocies have allowed us to ignore -- little things like the healthcare crisis, race relations, the dismal state of public education, and the soaring prison population.

Bush is responsible for some of these problems, but not all of them. And it doesn't ultimately matter what he's responsible for anyway. Once he's gone, we're going to simply have to deal with what's in front of us.

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