By Joseph Galloway There are just over 600 days left until Jan. 20, 2009, and the end of our long national nightmare as President Bush and his Rasputin, Vice President Dick Cheney, shuffle off to their necessarily well-guarded retirement homes and onto the ash heap of history.
So much of what they talked about doing in a new century and a new and different world never came to pass. So much of what they did to grow the power of the presidency and prune the constitutional safeguards crafted by our Founding Fathers, they never talked about.
He has failed in his quest for victory in Iraq and for a world put in order by a new and stronger United States, and his brash blundering into a dangerous land has made us all much less safe.
The president's approval ratings are below his knees, sinking to 28 percent in one recent poll, and he cannot recover short of the kind of miracle that parts seas and feeds the multitudes.
The question is: How did such ordinary-looking men -- seemingly unable to carry out even the smallest nonpolitical tasks of governing -- succeed in doing such extraordinary and lasting damage to our country, our military and our body politic in so few years?
The president's hopes of crafting meaningful immigration reform and fixing Social Security are dead on arrival. The legacies that Bush will carry into retirement are the war he started, lost and stubbornly refused to end, and the corruption that he and his team visited on our democracy and Constitution.
The president's lawyer, "mi abogado," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, dangles in the wind as we learn day by day of how grotesquely this administration politicized the professional staff of the Justice Department.
It was Gonzales, as White House counsel, who provided legal cover for the torture and maltreatment of prisoners and suspects that led directly to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the CIA's secret, Kafkaesque prisons scattered around the world where "enhanced" interrogation methods were generously if unproductively employed.
It was Gonzales, as attorney general, who hired and gave unprecedented hiring and firing powers to a 33-year-old attorney, Monica Goodling, who'd graduated from a TV evangelist's law school. It was Goodling who resigned and took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions that hadn't even been asked. It was Goodling who was Justice's liaison to the White House and Karl Rove.
Meanwhile, the White House can't find 5 million e-mail messages involving official business and refuses to provide many of those that it can find to the congressional committees investigating the firing of U.S. attorneys.
The agencies of government -- the CIA, FBI, Treasury, Department of Defense and who knows who else -- use secret executive authority to suck up databases of personal information about ordinary Americans, without regard to their privacy rights, in a search for terrorism suspects.
Over in Iraq, 150,000 American troops soldier go on attempting, at the cost of their own lives and limbs, to follow the orders of a president who still thinks he can pull victory out of defeat.
A democratically elected but hopelessly divided Iraqi parliament feuds and dithers and contemplates its summer vacation while Americans and Iraqis die in increasing numbers in the streets outside the Green Zone, and the mortar and rocket fire lands inside that sanctuary with increasing frequency.
Six hundred-plus days and counting. Nineteen months. It doesn't seem possible, or even bearable.