The Hangover

>...is a consequence of the Bush administration's failure to confront Tehran and the United Nations Security Council.<

The ‘failure’ you refer to was quite a bit more pervasive than just that. For eight long years we allowed our Commander-in-Chief to be attacked, ridiculed, threatened, blocked, and disparaged. We allowed Democrats, the press, Hollywood and academe to spew vile accusations and stir up palpable hatred towards this man and his administration. Yes, the Bush administration was ineffective in many ways. I'm surprised it lasted two terms, punch drunk as it had become. I blame the American people (and Republicans in particular) for letting all this go on unabated for so long.

The orgy over now, we look around at the shambles it’s left us with - like the bachelor party boys in the current hit movie, 'The Hangover', awakening after a night of madcap carousing - remembering nothing. No, John, this was a collective failure on the part of all of us.

Every time one of us succumbed to the compulsion to inflate his own anemic ego by slamming our president and country over cocktails (or in front of our gracious hosts on foreign shores) we eroded our own position. Every time we let the insults pass without counseling restraint we helped to cripple our duly elected leadership. Every time we paid good money to attend Bruce Springsteen concerts, applauding baseless invective hurled at our president, we fed the fiction that would come to be known as ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome’.

Now that we’ve sobered up, we wonder what has happened to us. Well, let me tell you, we’ve blown it. We’ve blown the whole wad. And, what’s more, we can’t get back to how it was without a major effort that will likely deprive us of what little we have remaining. Frankly, John, pointing fingers now is just too pathetic for words.

I’m not saying we can’t criticize our president. But we must do it with some measure of respect for the office, all the while remembering that the man occupying it is of flesh and blood – like us. We turned Bush into a two dimensional video game caricature, a bean bag, a Mexican piñata. We’re on the verge of doing the same to Obama. Only, it seems to me, that Bush would have been more receptive to sober, constructive criticism – had we had any to give other than simply parroting, “Bush sucks!” over and over again. Now we see that Bush didn’t suck half as much as we do.