In the Bush's shadow

It's something I knew about all along. We all did. And somehow, I filtered it out:
We are standing in Bush's shadow.
A chill crept up the back of my head. I thought about it again today. The dark shadow. And again, the chill. It gives me chills just thinking about it (the chills).

Bush's dark legacy is very much with us. He and Guantanamo and global warming and afghanistan and the economy and Iraq and abu-ghraib with its poor, masturbating inmates.
Clearly, it'll take at least two or three generations (possibly centuries) to fully step away from Bush's long, dark shadow.
It's like having some massive overdraft. Needing to take out a mortgage on everything you own and then paying it back bit by bit, passing the remaining debt to your children, your grand-children and so on. As Mark Steyn (or: Mark "indicted but never convicted" Steyn) points out, we don't have lots of kids anyway. It's not as though a great many will suffer.

Obama inherited a towering 'debt' (economic, moral) and he has to mortgage America (which is his, so to speak, his=our America), paying back the debt with interest, passing it along to our kids, great-grand-children. Not his debt. Bush's.
Thanks to Obama the economy is thriving, the stimulus created 3.5 million jobs (some people still have no job but then again, some have two!) and global warming is apparently already retreating (out of fear, probably, in anticipation) but if you meet some dhinger (for example: Mark Steyn ("it's not islamophobia if they're really out to get you") or his inarticulate and litigatious side-kick, one Ezra "I got away with it so sue me" Le-Vant) who says things (international relations / the economy / whatever) should be better (a tautological form of reasoning), first remind him of Bush's legacy.

Like humpty-dumpty (America), all the King's (Obama's) horses and men might not be able to put it together again exactly the way it used to be. I mean an arm might go where the leg should (and v.v), the cracks will show, etc.

That doesn't mean we should give up and stomp on its head (voting Republican or endorsing pollution-based mutants like Palin). Better a slightly lopsided, teetering Humpty-Dumpty, with one leg looking suspiciously like an arm and a sunken cheek than to have a totally wrecked, scary humpty-dumpty out on a rampage in Arab countries. Better to extend an arm or a leg to Iran in friendship than to bomb it and trash what's left of our reputation.