So Bush had his farewell address tonight, and I watched it. Why? A grim resolve to see it ended, I suppose. It failed to cheer me up. These have been a rough 8 years, you know, for people who value their sanity.

I remember the first time I heard the term "BDS: Bush Derangement Syndrome." This was back when the blogosphere was young, probably about January of 2003, so long ago that Atrios was still calling Krugman bad names.

Anyway, like a lot of people, the first blog I read was Tom Tomorrow’s. I’d sought out his site because the cartoons were funny, but also because there was a real dearth back then of other people in the world who were not completely bananas. The autumn of 2002 was a very horrible time to be a thinking American. As bad as it’s been since then at various points, that was the absolute nadir, with Bush’s approval ratings soaring and the entire nation, it seemed, cheering on a ludicrous, pointless war. We were all down the rabbit hole and getting fucked like bunnies. Tom’s site was the only place I’d discovered where I could read the opinions of someone else in what seemed like the whole freaking country who was of the opinion that up was up, down was down, and goofy bloodthirsty bullshit was goofy bloodthirsty bullshit.

And then Tom started linking to Hesiod’s now defunct place, and to Eschaton, and I learned that there was such a thing as a "comments section" where you could say "fuck" a lot, and I was off and running. Because not only was the stuff being shoveled (aluminum tubes! Drones of death! Colin Powell’s integrity!) vicious jingoistic horseshit, it was comically transparent vicious jingoistic horseshit. And all of a sudden I could say so! On the Internet! Which was the only place you could!

What had always killed me, and still does, is the up is down-ism. The gleeful contempt for anything approximating reason. These people would just spout out any damn thing that popped into their little pea brains — which was why the "BDS" nonsense was so astounding. "Aha! If you think Bush is lying the nation into a mindless war, you have been driven mad with hate!" This was crazy squared — no, crazy cubed. What I mean is, what John Cole says.

Whatever comes next, for the next eight years, I just hope it ain’t that.