What just happened . . .

t the dawn of the new millennium, America stood unchallenged as the greatest military and economic power in the history of the world: the Cold War had ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economy had created vast, albeit somewhat overheated, prosperity and technological advances, such as the one you are using now to read these words, that transformed life on earth, and the fiscal strength of the United States Government, thanks to modest tax increases on the richest and spending restraint, had created surpluses that were on track to eliminate the entire national debt.

Nine years later, America lies in ruins. Thousands died from a predicted and preventable attack by a handful of fanatic extremists armed with nothing more than credit cards and box cutters. One of its greatest cultural treasures was destroyed by a foreseen natural disaster and remains in large part an uninhabitable wasteland. Its riches were squandered by a brutal and counterproductive war of choice and the failure to regulate the inevitable and controllable excesses of capitalism. Its government finds itself trillions in debt, with trillions more needed to prevent a second Great Depression. 

Catastrophe on this scale is beyond the power of any single person, no matter how powerful or evil. Yet one reckless individual bears responsibility in large measure for the consequences of all, and the perpetration of most, of these disasters. That man is the departing President of the United States, George W. Bush.

This publication, now in its 239th year, first appeared at a time of crisis: the struggle of the American colonies to overthrow the yoke of Great Britain and form the first democratic republic since Rome. With independence won, the Spy went on hiatus, reappearing a century later at the time of the next great national trial brought on by the treason of a slaveholding elite willing to destroy a nation to preserve their power to hold other human beings in cruel bondage.

That struggle ended, after the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, in a partial victory for the Union and the forces of civilization. Again, the Spy thought its work was done. But it was not to be. We still live with the consequences of the imperfections of that victory, some of which are due to be vanquished on Inauguration Day, 2009.

Early in this century, the Spy returned, sensing that the installation of George W. Bush as President by a cabal of five Republican Supreme Court justices who acted in violation of their oath could lead to crises as severe as those prompting its earlier publication. The reality turned out to be far worse than we could have predicted.   

Our task was to warn, advise, criticize, and, above all, to bear witness, so that history would record centuries from now that Bush's depredations did not pass without the condemnation they deserved. With Bush's imminent departure, we considered once again suspending our publication, but our work is not done.

For George Bush did not act alone. Rather, he was the point of a spear wielded by the three mighty arms of the Republican Party: the party of greed, which yet seeks to undo Roosevelt's New Deal and return the country to the tender mercies of the rich and powerful; the party of intolerance, which contemns and calumniates those it regards in some manner as different from themselves; and the party of reckless foreign adventurism, which successfully advocated and today still defends waging aggressive war against a foreign country simply to show the world how powerful America supposedly is, while stooping to the same barbarities they so quickly condemned in others.

George Bush is soon gone, and will be, in our guess, soon forgotten. Yet those who made his deeds possible and justified them so shrilly in our mass media are still with us, and still devoid of remorse. As they try to insinuate themselves back into the political and cultural life of this nation, we must and we will continue to hold them responsible for their mendacity and their misdeeds. Only by doing so can we do our part to prevent a recrudescence of the ideas, such as they were, that animated George W. Bush.

As to history's judgment on the man himself, only he remains in doubt. All others can read its verdict on George W. Bush chiseled forever into human memory: last in war, last in peace, last in defense of the Constitution he had sworn to uphold, and last in the hearts of his countrymen, whom he has served so ill.

– The Editors