Jane has been chaperoning me around the city. The van, as pictured, is deep in snow. It's sort of like the annual rite of resurrection. For the past several winters, I've allowed it to get buried in, then as it thaws it comes out of the white shroud and miraculously roars back to life.

Monday morning and the sky is that winter blue that says it is going to be bitter cold outside. Jane has the day off for Rev. King. We'll probably try to slip off to the Conservatory for her mid-winter sanity break. Later, we need to find the fireworks. After eight long years, the nightmare comes to an end tomorrow.

When this guy started in office, he didn't frighten me. Granted his election was a stain on the history of the country, there was such an uproar, that I figured he wouldn't be able to be an effective leader. During the summer of 2001 he became irrelevant. Then the madmen attacked the West. That was when he used the power of the military to kidnap people, slip them away into the dark, torture them. People in this country who should have known better, including our useless Congressman, now the White House Chief of Staff, were frightened of challenging him.

He developed software to listen to our calls, he developed laws to strip our rights. At one point, as Jane was doing one of her protest things at a public event, I explained that the country had slipped. “One of the goof balls around you will hassle you, maybe physically assault you” because of your political views. She was really depending on me to defend her and I pointed out that first, I'd do it automatically, but that I was older and would be hurt. And second, political speech was under attack. The police would send my ass to jail for protecting her. The guy who attacked us would be considered a hero.

If he hadn't overplayed his hand, attacking a country for weak political reasons and with a poorly thought out plan of exit this might have continued. People would have gone along and felt protected and safe while freedom was whisked away to be beaten and tortured in the dark corners of this country and the globe. The excuse would have been that it was only happening to “bad” people.

His inability to connect to people, his creation of a bubble of reality, his lack of awareness all seemed to come home to roost in August, 2005 when his political appointment of Michael Brown and his dismantling of FEMA led to a failure of the system when Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. No, we were not attacked by a foreign power. A hurricane demonstrated that the country had wasted nearly five years and billions. It was that wind that finally knocked down his house. What safety was there in this administration? We could survive a tropical storm and still die, waiting for it to answer the phone.

That he pursued economic policies that were doomed was evident early in his administration. Enron should have been a wake-up call that platitudes about market self regulation are just that. Enron happened early in this administration, and he could have blamed it on the Clinton's and been justified.

But, despite Enron, he pursued economic policies meant to dismantle market regulation throughout the economy. The final wake-up call for all but a minority of the country has been having their jobs threatened, their values of their homes and investments crash.

So, we'll celebrate tonight. And hope and pray for something better: a resurrection of the American spirit.