It was supposed to be a quiet year for Fearless Leader.  Everybody knew everything they needed to know about the man.  Reminders would serve only to make John McCain’s task more difficult.  As it was, the Ancient Mariner could not shake loose from the albatross.  But, Bush’s intentional absence probably saved the Geezer from a more vicious beatdown.  So give the man credit.  He did not make a disaster worse than it already was.  The man can be taught after all.

Anyway: what Bush did do essentially ran to form.  For a guy who is not known for his agility in language, “enhanced interrogation techniques” was such a lovely turn of phrase.  Vetoing a ban on such tactics allowed him to cling to that fiction just a little bit longer.  And the explosion in gas prices gave him a pretext for pushing for more drilling, the environment be damned.  And the dodging of subpoenas and the asserting of executive privilege and so on and so on. 

And, finally, the last straw.  The economy was, supposedly, the only strong point left, as the job market — notwithstanding the shift from manufacturing to service jobs, with worse pay, benefits and job security — was still hanging in there.  But, after years of lax regulation and oversight, the economy imploded.  He feebly tried to talk his way out of it, but nobody was listening anymore.

The bottom line?  Dubya was never one for polls — which is a good thing, because he reached the depths of his unpopularity just as people were getting ready to decide who his replacement would be.  And yet, despite it all, he summoned up the gumption to openly mock “the angry Left” at the Republican National Convention.  He, of course, was within his rights.  How could anyone have cause to be angry with him? 

There are about seventy different versions of this quote, but this one sounds about right:

America can always be counted on to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other possibilities.

Amen to that, brother.

As thus it came to pass that the Democrats went to the majority in the House and took controlish of the Senate.  And, therefore, all of the policies of the past would be reversed with a nice, loud WOOOSH. 

But, of course: no.  Displeasure at the Iraq War — ranging form between mild discomfort to outright rage — led the President to conclude that an escalation of troop levels was the best way to go.  The Democrats, in response, asked very nicely for timetables and then caved soon thereafter.  This would become a trend.

Meanwhile, Bush kept on pissing people off, with the minimum wage stall and the SCHIP fight.  You seemed to get the sense that Bush knew by the end of the year that he was not going to win anything by going to the middle, and thus doubled-down on Ronald Reagan On Crack.

Other nasty stuff got uncovered.  Mine safety became a full-blown scandal after a Utah mine — run by a guy who lobbied against increased protections in the wake of a 2006 West Virginia collapse — suffered a catastrophic failure.  And immigrants were the new gay.  (C’mon.  It was an off-off-year.  Gay would be the new gay, in time for Fall 2008.) 

This was also the year that we had confirmation of what we all knew: that Regent University School of Law is the bestest law school in the history of law since, like, ever.  (In related news, Alberto Gonzales hung up the skates.  So far as I know, he hasn’t found steady work since.  Stupid economy.)

This was the year of Ned Lamont, and of the very first Special Comment, and of others who made the rumblings of the previous year turn into a full-throated roar.  Dubya, not getting the message, hung onto the Iraq War (repeat after me: “the central front on the War on Terrah”) and Donald Rumsfeld like liferafts, for no real perceptible reason.  There’s a reason why they don’t make liferafts out of lead, of course; George, poor guy, never really understood that.  And thus the Republican Revolution of 1994 — at least in terms of pure numbers — was turned back.

Absurdity continued apace.  Dick Cheney shot somebody and wasn’t even arrested.  The government wanted to turn over port security to a bunch of guys from Dubai.  The government spying program mess began to escalate.  Mark Foley, it was discovered, was a proponent of children to a somewhat excessive degree.  John Kerry tried to tell a joke and damn near spoiled the election. And several federal prosecutors were shown the door in December, on account of no particular reason that people knew about.  Yet.

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.

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.

Two years of mismanagement did not convince the nation of what the world already knew.  And thus Bush had a free hand to do whatever he wanted.  And he did. 

A partial-birth abortion bill passed.  So did a prescription drug coverage bill.  The tax cut theology was followed in the three preceding years, but with this new entitlement, the die was irrevocably cast in favor of back-breaking deficits for the duration.  And this was the year of the worst Sixteen Words since “behind the bag, it gets through Buckner; here comes Knight and the Mets win it!”  If only it were mere words that offended.

A personal story, and rumblings of a growing hope, may be found after the jump.

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The year started with the signing of the No Child Left Behind act — under which the word “reductionism” was ordered stricken from vocabulary textbooks.  (It wouldn’t be on the test in a million years, so why bother?)

In related news: the Axis of Evil, the entrenchment of the Bush Doctrine (and at a graudation address at West Point, the first major public pronouncement of preemptive war as a foreign policy), a shift of focus away from Osama bin Laden (or, at least, the public disclosure of this shift), “regime change,” “Coalition of the Willing” and Toby Keith.  And, finally: the vote on the war — during which liberals totally forgot about the Klan and the pork and fell madly in love with Robert Byrd. 

Also: after getting stoned and contemplating a bowl of Lifesavers candy, the government gave birth to the Threat Levels — two of which have a lot of dust on them.  And President Bush damn near bought it after failing to correctly eat a pretzel.

Despite it all: the GOP still managed to take back the Senate.  Max Cleland, a war hero, got aced by a guy who basically said that Cleland had a total mancrush on Osama.  It would be nice to say, “well, it was just Georgia being Georgia” and leave it at that.  But that wasn’t the case, of course.