I clearly recall the jubilation of Nixon leaving office.  For most of us it was a long awaited moment of relief and perhaps the country would recover from the mean-spirited nastiness of the Nixon White House and the pall it cast over our great country.  I figured that the nation had learned it's lesson and as a people we would never let another tyrant like Nixon ascend to the Presidency and surely even if we did the Congress, with it's newfound strength, would not take so long to remove one if they emerged on the scene.

After a short respite of nontoxic leadership came the Reagan White House that was popular but not far underneath the surface there lurked the same penchant for criminality, the same disdain for the Constitution, the same belief that those in the executive branch new better than the Congress and besides, "If the President does it, it's legal."  Some skirmishes occured during the Reagan years but by and large the forces of lawlessness and criminality took the meaning of those encounters to be encouragement and not discouragement.  During the reign of Bush the first it seemed clear that such activities had been toned down to some degree and there was never any open clash between the executive and congress.

When the GOP lost control of the executive branch in 92 they quickly and with nearly manic determination decided to shift their abuses of power toward attempting to run Bill Clinton out of office.  They put everything they had in to this unethical and abusive attempt to undo the election of 1992 but ultimately their effort failed.

The GOP lost the race for the Presidency in 2000 but instantly used extralegal means to claim the Presidency for their party and install an imposter using their majority on the Supreme Court in an unprecdented and clearly illegal violation of the State of Florida's clear and unquestionable right to be the arbiter of its own elections.  The victorious Democrats, weary from years of outrageous fighting over the sex life of a the President demured and allowed the Republican theft of the election.

From the moment he took office, George Bush acted like a man who knew he had no right to the power he assumed and the same was true for an army of Republican operatives.  Understanding full well their power was illegitimate, they began instantly acting like the lawless rogues they are.  They ran roughshod over the congress, over our existing laws, asserted powers on behalf of the President that clearly have no constitutional basis and otherwise bullied and cajoled their way along.  This approach was keeping Bush's popularity dead in the water and gaining no traction on the hill when the attacks of 9/11 occured.  The only people in the country who had knowledge of the possibility of this kind of attack failed utterly in their duty to keep this nation safe.  The incompetence of our political and military leadership on that day was horrifying.  The obviously fearful President Bush, in a humiliating moment, finally went on tv after the attack and told the nation that we must now embark on a "war on terror" to get our vengeance for the dastardly attacks of that day.

The criminal minds of the Bush regime then proceeded to use the attacks they did nothing to prevent as the excuse for ratcheting up a series of illegal measures at home and abroad in the name of this mythical "war on terror."  Out of pure political fear, and in complete failure to do their duty in protecting our Constitution, the opposition Democrats not only didn't question but enthusiastically approved every bad idea the tyrant and his henchmen came up with.  Many of us commoners were howling and shouting and we were out in the streets trying to get the attention of our leaders to warn them this was a pack of lies, but it wasn't terribly popular so we were marginalized or ignored.  Our patriotism was attacked for daring to question the foolish, reckless and illegal war of agression carried out against the people of Iraq.

On the domestic front, with a closely divided and then GOP controlled Congress, Bush and his gang of criminals ran just as roughshod over the domestic affairs of the nation.  Actively and purposefully infesting ever federal agency with a hackery not seen since the days of Tammany Hall, corruption like we have not seen in the modern age was the order of the day.  The rich were given a huge and totally irresponsible tax cutting program while expenditures for all categories of spending spun out of control.  The deficits that resulted were so reckless it was breathtaking.  The national debt grew exponentially with each Republican budget's passage.  No department, no program was exempt from the moral corruption or the traditional financial corruption schemes that generally had not characterized the federal government for many decades.  Scandals of major proportion erupted in the Department of Defense as war profiteering experienced a heyday unknown since the Spanish War a hundred years earlier.  Even high ranking CIA officials were indicted by the time all was said and done.  The once world renowned US Justice Department and the widely respected office of Federal District Attorney were dragged through the mud of scandal and abuse unlike anything every previously seen since establishment of the Republic.  Even the judiciary was packed with right wing extremist hacks at every opportunity by the regime as they did their best to literally destroy everything the nation had built up over the past centure in terms of policy and personnel.  Every regulatory agency and department was used by Bush's gang to rape and pillage the enviornment and to dismantle every regulation out of pure ideological dogma.  Economic regulation in particular was either given up or loosened to the point of nonexistence.

The illegal war quickly came to be viewed as the stupid idea it was all along and drug down the reputation of the once popular imposter so that his real tyrannical character came into much sharper focus.  His hacks completely blew the Katrina response and helped to nearly drive beatiful New Orleans out of existence.  The entire gulf coast continues to lay in tatters to this day.  The people now began to see the tyrant for the ill-meaning dunce that he is and was.  Despite this, the tyranny continued unabated, the arrogance also continued apace while a pliant media and a pusilanimous opposition party did little to oppose his every outrageous and/or illegal whim.  Despite the failure of the media and the opposition all this time, the people saw through it all and had turned on Bush long before the media or Democrats found their confidence and began standing up to them.

Now, finally, after 8 long years of the darkest tyrrany comes the light of new and law-abiding leadership.  The people, the media, and the Congress must never forget what this was like and how close we came to losing our republic entirely because we were not far from it.  We cannot allow the criminal behavior of the past 8 years to go unchecked, uninvestigated and unprosecuted.  But whatever officialdom does, if ever another usurper arises and claims executive power illegally as did this one the people must not make the same mistake they did in 2000 by staying home and watching tv.  Next time, every citizen who loves the Constitution and liberty must hit the streets and literally demonstrate that we will never, ever allow that to happen again.  NEVER!

If we fail to do our duty and to be vigilant against the rise of another tyrant like Bush it could be fatal to our republic and that is simply unacceptable to every patrior or ought to be regardless of the circumstances.  My ancestors fought in the revolution so we could have our libertty unhindered by the arbitrary whimsy of any despot forever.  Look what happened when the Nixon gang went unpunished and when we did nothing to make clear to the lawless element in government that their lawbreaking will not go unpunished!  We got more and worse lawbreaking culminating in 8 years of lawlessness that makes the Nixon gang look like choir boys.  Never again America.  Never, never again!!!