After Eight Terrible Years...

After eight terrible years, I am looking forward to tomorrow with a profound joy and a sense of redemption. By the end of the day tomorrow, the path forward will be clear, and we will have made possible the restoration of good government - the days of the corrupt and incompetent Bush hackocracy will soon be over.

Barack Obama will be a good president - he has the potential to be great, but I will be satisfied with good.

Good is something not to be taken for granted, as we have seen over the past 2,839 days. We lost sight of goodness - it was lost in the tax cuts for rich people and deregulation for big corporations and banks; it was misplaced when we launched a war of aggression in Iraq and mistreated Iraqi civilians in Abu Ghraib; we lost sight of goodness as we also lost sight of the poor of America - and failed to come to their rescue when Katrina came ashore.

All the good Christian men and women who voted for Bush and placed their faith in this flawed idol called W, lost sight of the message of compassion that is the heart of the Carpenter's teaching. Played like simpletons. their faith-based initiatives were bent to serve the greed and ambition of K-Street gangsters like Tom DeLay.

A political party that once included wise men and women of moderate views and careful, sensible, and pragmatic economic and foreign policies, abandoned reason and scorned the limitations of reality-based thinking, and was rewarded with power they could only use for ill.

Eight long years of malfeasance and dereliction at Justice, the EPA, and across the breadth of the regulatory and administrative span of the government. A nation that had accumulated huge budget surpluses spent it all, and then some, ending in a financial calamity of a scale we have yet to fully comprehend.

It is all familiar and utterly repulsive, and soon it will be over.

Tomorrow is a day for celebration.

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