I had given up writing blogs for a while, as my job is especially busy this time of year.  To write even a mediocre blog takes time and effort, and I just don't have as much of either to give right now.

But today - just for today - I have to make an exception.

It is entirely appropriate - and a personal joy - to read the expressions of hope and optimism on this board.  Many bloggers correctly note that the heavy lifting begins tomorrow, but today is certainly a day for celebration, reflection and happiness.

May God forgive me, but I still have a lot of anger inside me.  Even on a day such as today, when Barack Obama will become the President about an hour from when I type these lines, I still feel angry.

I'm angry that intelligence that could have perhaps prevented at least some of the 9/11 attacks was ignored.

I'm angry that my President bum-rushed us into a seven-year war with a country that had absolutely no responsibility for those attacks - by lying to our elected representatives and my fellow Americans about their weapons capabilities and terrorist sympathies.

I'm angry that we're stuck trying to rebuild this country after killing approximately two million of its citizens.  The "moral leader" of the free world commits its very own Iraqi Holocaust, and the Crawford Clown actually defends it on national TV. 

I'm angry that hundreds of thousands of Americans were allowed to suffer and die as a result of Katrina.

I'm angry that a nation whose legal system is based on the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" - that provides its accused with the fairest trials on earth - could be made to swallow something as draconian as FISA.

I'm angry that, somehow, over 59 million Americans managed to vote this doddering, manor-born fool in for a second term as our President.

I'm angry that we swallowed his Treasury Secretary's plea for $700 billion dollars, only to watch half of it disappear into the very coffers that were supposed to be unfrozen for credit, with absolutely no means or assurances of recouping our tax investment.

I'm angry that we - me, you and everyone else - tolerated the pure, unfiltered evil that was Dick Cheney dropping his pants and urinating all over the Constitution. 

I could go on for another four or five thousand words.  But you get the idea. 

Now, maybe we had to go through a Presidency as horrific as Bush 43's to finally wake up to the idea that change was needed - real change, not only in how we conduct our politics, but also in how we conduct our individual lives, how we get involved and plugged in to our communities and our country, and how we hold our elected leaders responsible for their decisions.

Perhaps it was necessary to suffer the debasement of environmental standards, the systematic erosion of Constitutional protections, and the willful defiance of the Geneva Conventions to remind us that, while freedom isn't free, the cost is minimal when compared to the benefits of living in an America that actually lives up to the promise of its creed.

It could be that we needed to be slapped with the disaster of neoconservative "charge-and-spend" philosophy to realize that fiscal conservatism isn't a prerogative of any political party, but rather a basic American value that we desperately need to reclaim if our broken economy is to ever work again.  We needed to see, in blaring headlines, that sucking money out of Social Security and running up a 13-figure bill with our First Beijing charge card will create many more problems than they could ever solve.

And maybe we needed to be shown the logical conclusion of what happens when we devalue intellect, reason, compassion and erudition.  We needed to see what would happen if we took the idea that our leaders should be people that we could have a beer with and took it to the extreme.

I don't see any of the foregoing as individual errors.  I see it all in the collective - as one humongous, gigantic, national lapse of judgment.  George Walker Bush should never have been elected to a first term, and to repeat the mistake was a colossal faux pas that, honestly, the world shouldn't forgive us for very easily. 

No, I didn't vote for Bush in 2000 or 2004.  But what if I'd worked harder?  What if I'd done more?  What if I'd lent a louder voice to the chorus against the Bush Maladministration?  Could I have stepped up more and maybe helped prevent what we've gone through?  Maybe not.  And, again, maybe getting Obama, Biden and the rest of the new team is the payoff for our suffering. 

Thirty minutes until the inauguration of President Obama.  At 12:01 p.m. Eastern time, we can celebrate the end of a national nightmare.  We can enjoy the end of our national embarrassment in our White House. 

I will celebrate and enjoy.  However, I also choose to reflect on the end of an error, what that error has cost me, what it will cost my son and what it will cost his own children, yet to be born.  I know it's not celebratory, but I never, ever want to be this angry at my government again.  George Santayana said that those who do not remember the past are destined to repeat it.  George W. Bush gives me ample reason to believe that maxim.

Celebrate today, everyone, in all its historical significance and renewed belief in our nation's inherent greatness.  But never, ever forget the hell we've been through, and remain guarded against the seductive voices of "compassionate conservatism" that led us there.