Reviewing the last eight years

Tom Engelhardt, writing on his TomDispatch blog, sums up the catastrophe that W’s administration has been for this poor republic:

And what a debacle the Bush Doctrine proved to be. What a legacy the legacy President and his pals are leaving behind. A wrecked economy, deflated global stock markets, collapsing banks and financial institutions, soaring unemployment, a smashed Republican Party, a bloated Pentagon overseeing a strained, overstretched military, enmired in an incoherent set of still-expanding wars gone sour, a network of secret prisons, as well as Guantanamo, that "jewel in the crown" of Bush's Bermuda Triangle of injustice, and all the grim practices that went with those offshore prisons, including widespread torture and abuse, kidnapping, assassination, and the disappearing of prisoners (once associated only with South America dictatorships and military juntas).

Read it all here and breathe a sigh of relief that it will soon be over, one way or another … unless we get Sarah Palin as veep to an ailing John McCain. Maybe a real Republican party, a party like Eisenhower's – careful about spending, averse to foreign adventure, disinclined to meddle with the public, respectful of the Constitution – will come out of all this.