Roll the credits; bring up the house lights. The most painfully composed, most maladroitly constructed B-movie yet seen is over.

Good riddance to bad rub-Bush.

Adieu to the panicked, the inept, the feckless and the scurrilous of the last woebegone administration, to those cohorts of it dedicated to employing and exploiting the flag as a shield and as a shroud, to the profligacy of the nefarious.

Looking back at the last great sea change in governance during the direst of economic times, from the March 8, 1933 issue of The Nation come sentiments all too contemporarily relevant:

…It was a Grand Old Party—for them—while it lasted. Makers and beneficiaries of our politico-economic system, these are the men whose failure is now written large in the towering empty edifices that scrape the New York sky, in the hundreds of thousands of “For sale” and “To let” signs which adorn our cities, in the closed banks, in the foreclosed farms, in the whole picture of devastation which has come under their rule.

Have these captains and kings departed—not to return? The epoch of their wanton and repulsive leadership is ending. Their incompetence and their betrayal are manifest. But much of the evil they have done lives after them. The coming years will see the struggle to purge America, to reassert the promise of American life, to validate, in consonance with the changed times and conditions, the high aspirations of the founders of the nation. Mr. Roosevelt has the opportunity to be the leader of this renaissance, but he will have to forge as his instrument a wholly different Democratic Party from that which so long has been indistinguishable from the Republican. Source

It is the end.

It is the Last Day of Madness.

For those conversant with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation triology, it has been akin to witnessing the regime of The Mule.

We bid sayonara to the sociopaths and the megalomaniacs, to a government dominated and controlled by the small, shriveled souls of thugs not seeking justice but bent on revenge.

It is the final stanza of the modern March of Folly. Removed from the helm and the levers of power are those, and their enablers, who would willfully and deliberately subvert and pummel the Constitution (and consequently, America) onto life support, even then all but reaching to yank the plug.

The Era of Crassness is waning away as we opt for the return of diplomacy as a viable, robust and preternaturally favored tool.

Good-bye to functioning from the gut and shooting from the hip. Hello to operating from the head — and the heart.

It is the passing of a time dedicated to tearing down the structures of government of, by and for the people, and the re-emergence of a time cognizant of the necessity of rationally and efficaciously building them up.

It is the return of the reality-based community.

It is the end.

It is the beginning.
 
 
 
 
 

N.B.: Some links overlaid on existing text after initial posting.