OP-ED: Dubya's Greatest Gift (The AUSTRALIAN)

A couple of years ago a reader sent me a marvelous little gadget that counted down to the end of the Bush administration. In days, hours, minutes and hundredths of a second. I used to read out the figures on my wireless program – though for the past year or so the dancing digits seemed to be slowing to a glacial pace. As though the great day would never come.

But despite Bush’s denial of climate change, glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate and, suddenly, the end – his end – was nigh. Whereupon the figures became faint and, with the premature death of the battery, faded to black. When the blackness should have shrouded him! The bloke who gave us an entire Dark Age in just eight years – the eight endless years of his obscene incumbency.

To make matters worse I missed out on the inauguration of Barack Obama, something I’d yearned for for so long. His swearing-in – and the banishment of Bush, the greatest buffoon in modern political history – occurred while I was 10,000m over the Middle East. Please forgive this belated response to a great event, but until I read these words I won’t believe it’s finally happened.

My distinguished colleague Frank Devine mourns Bush’s passing. Having been devoted to GWB and all his causes, Frank spoke for fellow pundits – at least a dozen disciples without a single Doubting Thomas – when he insisted that history will judge Bush a great president. That explains all the winged pigs I saw out the plane window.

The judgment of history? I’d prefer the judgment of a War Crimes Tribunal for the lot of them – Bush, Cheney and the repugnant Rumsfeld.

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