Mercifully, the United States amended their constitution in the late fifties after Dwight Eisenhower won several consecutive federal elections, so George W. Bush will be stepping down in January 2009.

It’s difficult to summarise the reign of error that has prevailed in the United States for the last nine years. It all began with W.’s spin that he was a ‘compassionate conservative’, which meant that he supported throwing money at religious social service providers in his ‘faith based initiatives’ programme, without supervising expenditure. It continued with his brother, Jeb Bush, and the convenient resolution of the electoral deadlock in Florida which led to his brother’s presidency.

Of course, it was easy for W. to bungle things sufficiently so that his negligence led to the tragedy that destroyed the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. It was also easy to subdue a fragmented and dysfunctional failed state, wracked by decades of civil war.

After that, though, W.’s attention wandered, and due to his previous polydrug experiences with cocaine and alcohol, he started seeing things that weren’t really there- like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In 2003, Anglo-American forces invaded the dysfunctional dictatorship, toppled Saddam, and installed an unstable client regime. After Saddam’s execution, it became clear that the country was dissolving into warring Shia and Sunni factions, and after five years, the quagmire in question has no end in sight. The war vacuumed up large amounts of money, adversely affecting the US civilian infrastructure. In 2001, early corporate failures should have signalled that something was amiss, but Bush and his cronies were too obsessed with foreign policy matters to bother with the deteriorating economy. Or, instituting a federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, while trying to justify torture of Al Qaeda operatives, or suspects.

In 2006, though, years of an unpopular war, its US service fatalities, continued economic hardship, federal Republican corruption and the usual US Christian Right excesses led to the termination of a decade of federal Republican ascendancy. The Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives and US Senate. When the banking and mortgage crunch came earlier this year, it probably doomed Bush’s successor, Republican Presidential nominee, John McCain. Not even selecting an Alaskan fundamentalist female Governor as his vice-presidential running mate could save him from the poisoned chalice that Bush had left him.

Goodbye, American idiot.