There is no doubt at all a sea change is going on, and my ideological cohort, the Reason-magazine type, Hayekian libertarians is something of a canary in the political coalmine. For decades, since the 60s or so, we tended to overwhelmingly vote GOP. That began a decline in 2000...

Translation: Ooops! My bad!

While no one would be happier to be wrong than I would be, I think a lot of commenters here are guilty of some seriously wishful thinking.

Given the incredible -- and at this point unspinnable -- policy disasters of Bushco, there was bound to be some backlash, but, as Hacker and Pierson call it, our system is still rigged to provide "backlash insurance" for politicians that the Republicans in Congress are still taking advantage of. I see no sign of any media whore contrition. Quite the opposite, they are going after Dems like we were right back in the Clinton years. They are under greater attack now because of blogs, but they still have orders of magnitude more readership and viewership than blogs and all I hear is more and more media whore arrogance, the repugnant David Broder being the only the most recent case in point.

The Democrats are still an incredibly weak "opposition" party and before we get all triumphal about the 2006 midterms as a harbinger of a coming realignment, remember the Republicans were actually starting to make a comeback before Mark Foley came along and turned it around. We aren't always going to have a well-timed Mark Foley incident.

The corporations have no problem with Bushco policies, they have profited quite nicely. The right-wing religious nuts are practically irredeemable. They still love Bush. Given the extremism of the Republican junta, I still fear that we are only one terrorist incident away from an even more serious challenge to our democratic system than the one we already face.

Maybe, just maybe, the ice has begun to thaw a little, but it is going to take years more of hard work before we can even begin to say we have safely navigated our way through the shoals of the Bush Psychosis which overtook this country. One key will be publicly and explicitly holding the Republicans accountable for the political (and literal) atrocities they have committed. Just as Reagan relentlessly intoned the anathema, "Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter" we have to make sure that all of the major disasters Bush and the Republicans have left for our country when they are finally turned out of power -- IF they are turned out of power -- are pinned not only on Bush but also on the Republican party as a whole, which so enthusiastically endorsed his crimes every step of the way.

There has not been an elected Republican president since Eisenhower who did not run seriously afoul of the Constitution and the law. I want to see the Republican party beaten into political submission until they can no longer function as a viable party and fade away into history, replaced by some more respectable successor, perhaps some new libertarian party since they are only half as crazy as the Republicans.

It would be nice, very nice ideed, to finally feel as though I were in the majority of American conscienceness. Though there have been lots of friends, it's still been lonely.

Once the people recognized they have been decsived, they are not likely to be deceived again.

Goodbye Mr. President, goodbye. I wish you well in your personal life.

But, of course, "Bush Derangement Syndrome" is 200 Proof projection from the folks who brought us Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

BDS has always been one of the more bizarre inventions of the Bush cultists. There's no comparison between the way they attacked Clinton (from the day he took office, before they knew what kind of job he would do) and the way most Americans came to realize Bush is a dangerous idiot, (by watching him screw up everything he's touched,) and have started to let their thoughts be heard. This another example of the right accusing their perceived enemies of doing the very thing they themselves do, and suddenly deciding it's very wrong. It certainly is projection, but of a kind that leaves me shaking my head at the audacity involved.

It isn't really possible they don't remember that they treated Clinton exactly the way they claim those who've come to dislike Bush, treat Bush, yet they hope to convince people that those who dislike Bush do, in fact, treat Bush this way, (when it's obvious people just came to dislike Bush by seeing how badly he did his job,) and at the same time hope we all forget that righties treated Clinton exactly the way Bushies now call deranged..

Utterly bizarre.

Nabalzbbfr: "Bush [Jr.] will be seen in hindsight as a great Prophet, who set in motion the forces of freedom and prosperity both here in the US and throughout the world."

Sadly, no. There is not a chance in hell that arrogant prick (or his satanic veep) will ever be remembered fondly by anyone, save a handful of churches in the American midwest and south in which snakes are handled and/or the faithful are wont to speak in tongues.

Junior will be remembered (if at all) as just another failed Texas president who came to office through extraordinarily tragic events and not by the votes of We the People; who lied to ignite a foolish and unnecessary war that turned out very badly; and yet who, unlike LBJ, had no civil rights agenda or other redeeming qualities and lacked even the human decency to step aside when the full magnitude of the disaster became apparent.

In other words, worse than LBJ or Nixon, but perhaps responsible for fewer victims than Attila, Genghis, or Timour. Probably somewhere in the same ballpark as King George III.

Sincerely,

History

Don't be a dope.

Bush won't be remembered as anything other than complete failure and the worst President in American history so far.

Prophet? Don't make me laugh.

Well no, na ga happen.

What's "Normal" -- by anyone's definition at this point?

Not to throw cold water on the Celebration (I know, I know, no one is dancing in the streets yet, anyway), but we've been precipitously plunging off a cliff the past however many years -- depending on when you want to start your count -- and we haven't hit bottom yet.

We can see it coming up fast.

But the crack up is yet to come.

And there's no turning back. There is no Normal to return to.

There is only whatever Future we can cobble together out of whatever wreckage remains.

Are we going to restore the Constitution, for example? It doesn't look like it. Not to say it can't happen, but the likelihood is low considering how little is said about it in the Public Square, and how much every branch of government has already acquiesced to the shredding of the Constitution -- and its substitution with Autocracy. Yes, for the moment, this Autocracy is being rejected, but not the concept itself.

A New New Deal would be worth looking into, to try to redress some of the worst aspects of recent income redistribution efforts toward the wealthy, but that's not likely, either, is it? The idea is almost laughable.

How about ending the Iraq Debacle, then? Surely, that's going to happen, yes? I would beg to disagree. There is really no sign at all that our Mesopotamian Satrapy is going to be let go any time this century -- though it may be wrested from us by the Natives with or without the assistance and encouragement of the successors to the Persians and the Ottomans. We know we don't belong there and never did, but our Governing Class cannot -- to save their own skins -- let their Overseas Departments... depart. So. Carnage will continue indefinitely.

Yes, there is a sea change in that the Republican Ascendancy is Done. Period. End of rule by those Overlords. Bush's pathetic mewlings about how "sorry" he is it's come to this are, well, pathetic. And Raging Bull Cheney's pronunciamentos are met with yawns more than even the ridicule and laughter they deserve these days. Stern lectures from the congressional Busheviks and their Media enablers are left to wither.

There are still those who assume the Dems will cave yet again as they "always" do, but we've gotten to this point because they haven't caved since being elected to the majority of both houses of Congress (the Senate, of course, always iffy), and the resolve they've shown in the face of Bushevik and Media assaults is really all that was required to put the catcallers in their place. The fact that the Dems are telling them to STFU (and turn over the documents) -- finally -- is having a tremendous effect, yes, but not to get us back to something "normal" (unless I'm misunderstanding the term), but to move us forward into the frankly Unknown.

We do not know how this is going to turn out. There is much reason for hope, and much reason for dread as well.

From appearances, it looks like the right wing authoritarians are going into full, panicky, screaming retreat. They know something bad has happened to them, they don't understand what it is, and they see they can't stop it. The American People have turned on them Big Time, but they don't know what it means, any more than we do.

What does a Post-Bushevik world look like? How do we undo the damage? Or do we undo it?

Our tendency is to just move on. Leaving the debris of failed experiments to be dealt with eventually -- or not as the case may be -- and coming up with something else again to fill in temporarily, which routinely becomes permanent.

It's more than fair to call the Reagan through Bush II "conservatism" a failed experiment, and yet some of it is bound to continue. The Old New Deal through the Great Society might be characterised as a failed experiment in "liberalism" as well, though parts no doubt will be preserved and continued long after all of us have shuffled off our mortal coil.

The beauty of the American experiment is that though we do fail, repeatedly and sometimes spectacularly, we try to get things right, and -- at least so far -- have been able to move forward no matter what else happens.

But do any of us know what comes after Bushevism?