Posted April 9, 2008 | 09:53 PM (EST)

If one were to evaluate -- for the umpteenth time -- George Bush's presidency over the last eight years, it would most likely be graded with a colossal, red, angrily scrawled F, the presidency along with an overarching American policy having been remade in Bush's own fatally imperfect, inconceivably incurious and maddeningly mediocre image.

And -- for the umpteenth time -- any critique of Bush and his illegitimate legacy is not necessarily an attack on Republicans or conservatism or rampant, unchecked capitalism. However, due to their complicity in his ruinous and divisive two terms it comes damn close.

In fact, any and all appraisals that conclude with BushCo having critically devalued America and all it ever stood for are in actuality well-documented and fact-based assessments. They recount the tale of a country which allowed its essential morality to be wrested away by a series of vainglorious, smooth-talking hucksters, its national identity enslaved and ignominiously pimped out. With billions of dollars made, millions of people shackled to erosive economic policies and thousands of innocents crippled or killed in an illegal war, it could probably be viewed as the largest and, given that prosecution of those involved is improbable, most successful criminal operation in history, and not merely a series of tendentious rants spewed from liberal pantywaists.

Of the situation in Iraq alone, throwing up a smokescreen comprised of young, principled conscripts engaged to fight an enemy forged as if out of a child's night terrors, all to conceal his tumescent, neocon machinations, qualifies him for a life sentence of clearing brush on the grounds of a federal penitentiary.

Of its all-consuming "war" on terrorism, BushCo huffs out its chest and flourishes the flag, bamboozling the sentimental suckers with Three Trillion Card Monte, scrambling their senses and blunting their intuition, forcing them to behave in such a way that proves once and for all that reckless patriotism is nothing if not Pavlovian.

Of its overtly oligarchic economic policies, BushCo has thrown prudence, balance and caution to the winds and left the remaining non-millionaires in the United States to forage among the outsourced and underfunded scraps for fiscal stability.

Of its brazen disregard for science and reason, BushCo stalled for as long as it could to acknowledge what anyone possessed of sense already knows: human beings, beguiled by seemingly unlimited wealth, with all their greed and lack of both foresight and care, are crapping up the planet. And that the Earth is not the one that will suffer, it is her inhabitants.

Of its universal arrogance and disrespect not only for the Constitution, for our natural resources, for patience, for wisdom, for liberty, for its clear disdain for citizens everywhere and its use of them as fodder for their profiteering, no penalty would be too severe.

Of its highjacking of the Republican party and conservative philosophy thereby rendering any future champion falling under those respective banners suspect, the memberships of those institutions should appoint ombudsmen faithful to the foundation of a free, democratic society to help ensure that BushCo and its ilk will never find purchase among them again.

And lastly, of its smearing of the American legacy as a bulwark of liberty, a country that is not merely a symbol or an idea but a living, breathing example of the highest in human endeavors, of this is BushCo most egregiously offensive. Its unchecked power has been an affront to every one of the original founders who lent their signatures to the document declaring independence from a tyrannical monarchy and as such should be labeled as the greatest act of treason in America's history.

It's almost time for the final evaluation. BushCo has failed. Will we?