Worrying a Little Bit? MAD Magazine Goes Quarterly

...don't let it hit you on the ass on your way out.

More good lefty spuzz:

True, he wasn't wrong on everything. In an eight-year span, you can't be wrong about everything, or else you would have ended up catatonic after eating 53 pounds of fudge and chasing it with a glass of Drain-O on a dare. You would have gotten run over at least 90 times by speeding D.C. cabs after uttering the phrase, "C'mon, we can make it before the light changes." You would have taken a leak on the third rail at the D.C. Metro and lit yourself up like a Christmas tree trying to disprove that electricity can flow upward. You would have been dead many times over after trying many stupid, stupid things, prefacing them with, "Well, if this doesn't kill me, nothing will..." Not being wrong about everything is not the standard I'm looking for in the leader of my country.

Source: Doc@First Draft

Dan Froomkin in the Washington Post

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 embraced torture as an interrogation tactic and turned the world's champion of human dignity into an outlaw nation and international pariah. He watched with detachment as a major American city went under water. He was ostensibly at the helm as the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression took hold. He went from being the most popular to the most disappointing president, having squandered a unique opportunity to unite the country and even the world behind a shared agenda after Sept. 11. He set a new precedent for avoiding the general public in favor of screened audiences and seemed to occupy an alternate reality. He took his own political party from seeming permanent majority status to where it is today. And he deliberately politicized the federal government, circumvented the traditional policymaking process, ignored expert advice and suppressed dissent, leaving behind a broken government.

There's more, and it's all good.

It's a weird, cold new year. I left a message for a pal that said something like that, and I meant it.

As the new year opens, I find myself ping-ponging crazily between the irrational euphoria of having the grown-ups about to return to some semblance of power again and the incredibly overwhelming amount of work that it's going to take to fix what's now busted.

Once, during the whole Bosnia mess, I found that I had to stop listening to the morning radio news because it simply lent a horrible pall to my day - the sort of thing that I've said happens in Milwaukee (and probably most of Wisconsin) the day after a Packers loss.

The difference here is that there's no solace to be taken in the loser's mantra of "Wait 'til next week". There is, I fear, no next week here. This is like the Super Bowl of crises a do-or-die moment - with potentially no next season.

When I stop listening to the morning news on the radio, I tend to replace the void not with music, but with other talk of humans. I listen to sports radio precisely because it allows for that loser's mantra and it has the same sort of histrionic bipartisan arguing, but at the end of it, I can just turn it off and walk away.