There's been a ghost haunting our politics of late, and his name is George W. Bush. Except for briefly materializing to nationalize the banks, Bush has been absent from our collective imagination, and I imagine we've all been glad for it. Unlike the end of the last eight-year Republican presidency, there's no last-minute uptick this time. Bush's ratings and the perception of the country as being on the right track are as low as they've ever been. His destruction of his party's brand is so complete that a much-loved Republican war hero and Wise Old Man of Washington is about to get taken apart by a black guy who's been in the Senate for less than four years.

Most of us would probably like to forget this whole sad part of our history, pretend it's 1993 again, give that post-Bush consensus a second chance. I can understand that impulse and I certainly sympathize with it, but it would be a mistake. With 2012 already on the horizon, it's vital that we understand and remember what the Bush administration and modern conservatism have meant for this country. If we look at this election as the quiet demise of a bad relationship we're going to fall back into the same pattern again. So let's take a moment to understand what George W. Bush's leadership has meant.

• Like a child of myth conceived in some violent tragedy, Bush's presidency was borne of the event that ushered in widespread mistrust of the American system of democracy. After the fairly brazen theft of the 2000 election, the 2004 and 2008 contests both were full of suspicion, some reasonable and some not. It is truly remarkable that, in the intervening eight years, only one action has been taken at the federal levels to deal with this problem, and that one -- the misnamed Help America Vote Act -- made things worse. Election theft and vote suppression is now SOP for the GOP, and nobody seems to care.
• Bush pioneered "compassionate conservatism," which is essentially a series of baby-halving issue stances that are neither compassionate not conservative. By freezing federal funding for new stem cell lines in 2001, but not for old lines and not banning private funding for either, Bush managed to hobble the domestic biotech industry without doing much to slow the overall flow of stem cell research or to actually save any embryos. It is one of the most patently stupid positions a president has ever taken, and it took him a week to decide.
• While he was deciding, he got a national security briefing titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." He dismissed it as intelligence agency ass-covering. Do I have to go any further?
• Despite Bush saying for years that we haven't been attacked since September 11, 2001, the person or persons who killed five people by mailing them anthrax still have not been caught.
• Let's roll, axis of evil, a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud, the Iraq AUMF vote, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, yellowcake, the deck of cards, Mission Accomplished, bring 'em on, Al Aqaa, Abu Ghraib, now watch this drive.
• In a textbook Karl Rove play, the Bush administration fired several Republican U.S. Attorneys who failed to come through with bogus vote-fraud cases against Democrats. Presumably this means the 80+ USA's played ball. Good news for public trust in democratic institutions!
• The day Hurricane Katrina made landfall I watched a lot of the CNN coverage. I knew, based on this coverage, that there was a risk from the storm itself and from potential levee breakage. Thus, I was horrified but not shocked when New Orleans flooded. George W. Bush was busy at John McCain's birthday party, and apparently couldn't tear himself away to check the news for a couple minutes. To be clear, the day New Orleans flooded was one of two days worse than any other in his presidency. On the first day, his low point was sitting immobile in a classroom for seven minutes while Americans leapt to their deaths to avoid a worse fate in the fire. That he could somehow have had a slower response on the second day is unconscionable. It is perhaps the single worst performance by a president in the modern era.
• "The Surge," generally regarded as having "worked," has Iraq no closer to political reconciliation and American troops no closer to leaving. If anything, it has further muddied the rationale for our continued mission there. So, for no reason that anyone can articulate, we continue spending nearly half a billion dollars a day on this adventure.
• Meanwhile, what's a couple trillion for the banks, give or take?

And look, this isn't everything. The fact that, because of some hare-brained scheme that could never have worked in a million years, I can't take a bottle of water through airport security is ridiculous, and everyone knows it, and it's policy anyway, because we now live in theatre. Fully describing that bit of the Bush legacy is a book-length treatise in itself. The story told by these greatest hits is a simple one: We can't forget this time. Watergate, Iran-Contra, the smearing of Valerie Plame -- these are the same guys and the same plays, over and over. Whatever you do over the next four years, remember that. They aren't going to jail, and even if they somehow did, they'll still be back. They always come back. There's a lot they can do once they make their way back into office, but before they do we have an enormous power over them. We can say no. Saying no starts today with a vote for Barack Obama.