Farewell to the thief

And so it comes to an end, eight years too late, not with a bang but with a whimper. George Bush is no longer president, Dick Cheney is out of power and America finally has a president again we can be disappointed in, but also have hopes for. Things won’t get perfect, but there now is a chance they will get better. Goodbye Bush. You won’t be missed. So long Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Rove and the rest of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. If only that chopper could fly all the way to Den Haag and the International Court of Justice. It’s been a long eight years of anger and despair but they’re finally over.

“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Now we’re at the beginning of a new era, perhaps “the early days of a better nation”. With the election of Obama Americans rejected not just everything Bush stood for, they first rejected the old school centrist Democratic Party politics of his rival, Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama, though he himself may not be, is the president of the left and with his inauguration a space is created for those of us on the left to help built an America that adheres to the ideals and spirit of the broad left, as Bush created a space for all the worst in America. This is our chance and our responsibility to help create a better America, a better world and Obama is the symbol of that chance. One woman I heard interviewed earlier this week, when asked about all the hopes and dreams invested in Obama and how difficult it would be for him to fullfill all those dreams, said it best when she said that Obama’s election slogan was “yes, we can”: he doesn’t need to do it alone, we all have to work with him.