Farewell to Dubya, worst president ever

Sure, there had been idiots and thieves in the White House before -- the Kennedys' stealing of the presidency from Nixon in 1960 remains one of the great political heists -- but they'd avoided doing too much damage, although that priapic drug addict JFK nearly managed to immolate us all in the ultimate bang over Cuba. But Bush was the Destroyer-In-Chief, wrecking havoc wherever he went, casting death and destruction wherever he turned his incurious gaze.

At some point after 2004, however, Dubya went one weirder than that. As if Ed Wood had suddenly replaced David Lynch at the helm, the whole thing spiralled into a new level of so-bad-it's-genius catalogue of genuine freakiness the like of which we had never seen before and will only see again in the event Uwe Boll decides to have a dash at Dubya: The Crawford Years.

And like all the best films, it didn't stop at one impressive set-piece, but kept building up, adding to the weirdness, level upon layer upon lunacy. Most would have been happy with Iraq going sour in spectacular fashion -- perhaps with a climactic bullet-fest as Blackwater guards desperately machine-gun Iraqi hordes daring to go about their own business in their own country -- but then they threw in the Katrina debacle (more folk with the wrong skin colour done over) and had a breather before closing out with the ultimate left-field climax -- the trip in time back to 1930 for a plunge into Depression.

No one picked that twist. It seems nothing was going to stop Bush wresting the title of worst president from James Buchanan's cold, dead, and very probably skeletal hands.

[ ... ]

Not sure about the democracy and human rights bits, but yes, at least hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have found peace. It might be the peace of the dead, the quiet of a mass grave or the silence of a grief-stricken family, but you take what you can get from this mob.

Political satire, per Tom Lehrer, might have become obsolete when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize but this is the new gold standard of genuine, 11 herbs-and-spices lunacy. It's not black-is-white logic but the reasoning of the genuinely insane, the sort that makes you want to move slowly away from your interlocutor and check for any sharp objects, while quietly tapping 000 on your mobile.

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