I used to hate George W. Bush along with all the rest.

When I was eight years old and his daddy was running for President, I sensed something rotten in the DNA. Chalk it up to the Jewish half of me resenting the WASP half or whatever you want. I dunno.

But here's what weird: Come 20 January, I'm actually gonna miss the little sonofabitch.

You know, in some ways, he wasn't all that bad.

America took a lot of shit under his helm. We took a battering to our national psyche as in no other time in our tapesterial history. The body count alone attests to that.

But somehow the dumb bastard smiled his -- our -- way through it.

Okay. We had two boomers at the helm. Two sides of the same coin for their generation, with all that comes with it.

For whatever reason they were indestructible. Atomic mutants spawned from the winds of Hiroshima in the autumn of 1945. Shit just bounces off 'em.

And maybe that's what it took. Mistah bin Laden, he's the same thing, too. An arrogant little mama's boy. He couldn't stand Bush, so he toppled the Towers.

But somehow Bush stood up to him by merely doing nothing. Shit, the man is gentler than I thought. He's not bad, not evil -- not like Cheney. He's a puss. And maybe that's what we needed, to make the world a kinder place. Yes, I said it. A kinder, gentler place. Ain't nothing wrong with that. One can be saccharin-sappy with such and still have a spine of steel.

A few weeks after 9/11, in my college newspaper column, I made reference to "this Phoenix empire rising from the ashes". I think that's what it is. American alchemy: we turn shit into gold. So out of the chaos of the Bush years we will get President Obama.

Kinda nice, eh?