Overture! Curtains! Lights! This is it! The Final Blight!

Porky and Daffy welcome you to our final Open Thread/Dropped Jaw of the Bush Administration’s War on English. We hear that Shrub is only going to annoy us for ten or fifteen minutes tonight, but hey, we wanted to send him out in style. We recommend a plexiglass shield before throwing shoes at your television.

Emergency landing in Hudson. Report is that everyone got out.

More photos.

Lost in the shuffle of Hurricane Katrina — the lunacy of “nobody anticipated the breach of the levees,” of “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job,” of everything else — was what, for me, is the true point-of-no-return for the Bush administration.

Anybody here remember Terri Schiavo?  Oh, now you do.  You remember how the Congress — after years of legal wrangling, leading to the repeated conclusion that the poor woman should rest in peace — overrode every precedent in order to strike a pro-life blow.  You remember how Bush interrupted his vacation to race back to Washington to sign the bill.  It was here when I began to sense a real change afoot — when average people (absent crazy libs) began to allow themselves to believe that George W. Bush and his pals really were not playing with a regulation deck.

There were other warning signs.  Just before the start of 2005, there was Rumsfeld suggesting that one does not go to war with the army one would wish for.  And then: trying to privatize Social Security — an idea which was nuts then, and absolutely insane in retrospect. And then: ramming John Bolton down a large number of throats.  And then: two horrendous picks for the Supreme Court — Harriet Myers (spiked) and Samuel Alito (not) — along with John Roberts (about whom I am strangely ambivalent).  And then: Scooter Libby’s indictment — the first celebration of Fitzmas.  And then; the Detainee Treatment Act, and the signing statement which effectively nullified it.

But it was the Schiavo mess, and the Katrina mess, that shook the nation out of a stupor.  Keeping a brain-dead woman mechanically alive is what the GOP wanted government to do.  Managing a natural disaster competently, so that hundreds of people didn’t die needlessly, would have been icing on the cake, but was not absolutely required.  This was the wake-up call that had been required for years.

If Dubya owns up to the mistakes of this year — this one year — tonight, I would be impressed… and strangely depressed at the same time.  But it ain’t gonna happen, of course.  There is too little time, and too many “courageous Americans” in attendance, to allow for a proper mea culpa.

Another day, another GOP wanker:

Today, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 16-1 to approve President-elect Obama’s nomination of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. Casting the sole “nay” vote was Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), who was concerned about Bill Clinton’s “multimillion dollar minefield of conflicts of interest.” Vitter has long been a Clinton foe, calling on President Clinton to step down in 1998 because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. In 2007, Vitter also revealed that he had been a client of the D.C. Madam’s escort service, but refused to resign.

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Join us at 7:45 p.m. ET for our Open Thread/Target Practice as we celebrate Shrub’s Farewell Malapropaganda to the Nation.

Ricardo Montalban has gone to that Corinthian-Leather-Upholstered Cordoba in the sky.

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2004 wasn’t all bad.  I mean, it was the year that Wonkette was unleashed on the world.  And the Illinois GOP’s attempt to put Alan Keyes up against Barack Obama was pure comedy. 

Other than that, though?  The one presidential candidate that was at all interesting was aced because he screamed.  And thus we were left with John Kerry, who decided to re-run the Gore 2000 campaign — bland and uninspired on the whole.  The Bush campaign and allies pounced — “flip-flop!”  chants, Purple Heart band-aids, the Swift Boat ads, the ads with wolves and other scary things, and — of course — “you forgot Poland.”

There was always a chance for Kerry, though.  Abu Ghraib was on everybody’s lips in the late spring.  The insurgency in Iraq expanded, and continued to expose the lack of planning that was now the Bush administration’s hallmark.  And, of course, John Kerry had a plan.

And yet, so did Karl Rove and his allies.  You could say that Kerry was doomed from the start, in that he was attempting to win by boring Republicans to death.  But this, in retrospect, might have been the high water mark of the religious right, as “values voters,” particularly in Ohio, horrified (for no good reason) about the imposition of (jarring chord) SAN FRANCISCO VALUES, sealed the win — which gave the President political capital that he intended to spend. 

Ah, but as we shall see, pride goes before a fall.  In our next installment: Bush administration fall down go boom.