I dunno. At least Bush is LEAVING office at a time when various world-busting global crises are coming to a head. Imagine Lieberman coming INTO the Oval and being the guy in charge of dealing with global warming, peak oil, and all the rest of that crap.

Obviously my original post was largely in jest, but there's a core of seriousness. We are about to elect our first black President, and it's not some tan guy named Fred Jones with American roots that can be traced back on both sides for several generations. We're about to elect a black man whose father was a Muslim national of a foreign nation, and who is named Barack Hussein Obama, to the highest office in the land.

And, in my opinion, we're also about to elect an extremely intelligent, savvy, street smart, and even somewhat WISE person to the office, at a time when we will need the most competent, clear eyed person there we can get. Without Bush screwing things up for the last 8 years, there is no way we'd have Obama as President for the next 4. We would, almost certainly, have either Lieberman or whoever the Republicans would have run successfully against Gore's second term -- maybe Guiliani, or someone like Bill Owens.

I don't want to go so far as to say that we needed eight years of Bush in order to put the nation in a position where it would elect the only person who might possibly guide us through the calamities that lie just over the horizon. I don't see Obama as a messiah. But I DO see him as being a much better person to be President of the United States than any other candidate we have now... or that we would have had, had Gore won in 2000.

Of course, I suppose we might always have opted to let Gore run for a third term...