The other day in the Washington Post, Dan Froomkin provided us all with a one-stop catalog of, um, catalogs of the failures of the Bush presidency, page after page of quotes from politicos and pundits near and far, the vast majority incredulous about just what has been going on for the last eight years. For the time-pressed, he gives us the Reader’s Digest version early on:
He took the nation to a war of choice under false pretenses — and left troops in harm’s way on two fields of battle. He …

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is bragging about a phone call he made to George W. Bush that made the U.S. abstain from voting for a U.N. resolution to stop the Gaza fighting. Israel didn’t think the plan provided for their security. Condoleezza Rice had helped craft the proposal and appealed to other countries to support it. Even if Olmert hadn’t run off at the mouth, it would have been obvious that something behind the scenes had happened when the U.S. didn’t vote for something Rice cared about so much. …

This oughta blow your mind:
And while he will miss many things about Washington, he won’t miss “the petty name-calling,” Mr. Bush said.
“I came with the idea of changing the tone in Washington, and frankly didn’t do a very good job of it,” he said.
I…just…wow. Wow. This is understatement on a scale so epic it’s impossible to express. I can only find adequate descriptive power in pictures:

From The Editors, the best explanation of Bush’s shoe-dodging I’ve yet seen:
Judged as a display of alertness and ninja prowess, the President’s dodge is, indeed, impressive.  But George W. Bush has spent most of his life fucking things up horribly, and then escaping any consequences for his incompetence and indifference.  This is who he is.  What you have seen is not a moment of quick thinking, it was  the man’s essence.  He always escapes unharmed.

From the “not really news to those who’ve been paying attention” files comes this little ditty from UPI:
 
An investigation of the U.S. Interior Department found serious flaws related to 15 decisions on policies for species at risk of becoming extinct, said the report delivered to Congress by Inspector General Earl E. Devaney.
One of those decisions involved reducing the number of waterways considered critical habitat for the endangered bull trout, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reported Tuesday.
The report describes “something akin to a secret society residing within the Interior Department that …

Muntadar al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush during the president’s appearance in Baghdad, is being beaten in custody according to his brother. Dargham Zaidi told the BBC that his younger brother has “suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding.” The journalist is to be prosecuted with the speculated charges being “insulting a foreign leader and the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri Maliki, who was standing next to President Bush during the incident.” The charges could carry up to a two year sentence. 
Though lawyers are clamouring …

Interesting press conference Bush had in Baghdad. The conqueror of Iraq was met not with flowers but with flying shoes…

I have to hand it to W — my reflexes probably wouldn’t be this good.
More info via McClatchey:
As Bush finished remarks that hailed the security progress that led to a U.S.-Iraq agreement that sets a three-year timetable for an American withdrawal, an Iraqi television journalist leapt from his seat, pulled off his shoes and threw them at the president. Striking someone with a shoe is a grave insult in Islam.
“This is …

In the final, lame duck days of his presidency, George W. Bush has been discussing his legacy. He’s been expressing regret for even entering the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, taking the blame for the country’s tarnished image overseas, acknowledging his poor hiring practices and suggesting ways that he might pay a penance for the damage he did to our nation and the world. 
Just kidding. He totally thinks he rocked the last eight years: 
In an interview conducted earlier this month by his sister, Doro Bush Koch, Mr. Bush said he wanted …

There could be a reason other than the universal disapproval of his administration that George W. Bush is not shaking (or being asked to shake) the hands of the other world leaders at the G20 summit. But I’m hard pressed to come up with a logical one. As CNN’s Rick Sanchez says, Bush looks like “the most unpopular kid in high school that nobody liked”. 
Video of the walk of shame (not that kind): 

So it’s been over a week since I last posted, mostly because I knew that after Brandy and acallidryas offered their thoughts I should put up some kind of election reaction and words were failing me. Seriously. It really is difficult to articulate what’s been going through my head the past week. This Onion headline captures a bit of it:

Kobe Bryant Scores 25 In Holy Shit We Elected A Black President

The mindblowing historic nature is part of it; another part of it is what the last eight years has been …