January 20th, 2009: The End of an Error

The title is from a bumper sticker I saw many times last year leading up to the election. Another is "Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing an idiot." We saw a clever one once: "A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V X Y Z"

Get it? No W.

I have never been a fan of W's. I didn't vote in 2000, mainly because I wasn't enthused about either candidate, plus Georgia is such a solidly republican state I knew my vote wasn't going to make a difference. Georgia went for Bush at a 60 percent rate. 2004 was different. I wasn't a big fan of John Kerry's either but I was pissed and I wanted to do SOMETHING. If the president is the CEO of the country, then I felt like he needed to be fired. Then the perfect ca-ca financial storm hits in the second term, and, well....

I'm not going to pile on W any more. I have always held that it was possible, however slight the odds, that his vision of democracy taking root in the Middle East might happen. But 5000 years of history say otherwise. Never has western man gone into the Middle East and anything good happened. When Reagan pulled the troops out of Beirut after the Embassy bombing and all those Marines died, he said in his memoirs that he hadn't counted on the irrationality of the people of the region. But time will tell. And his efforts to fund the war on AIDS in Africa was, and still is, a noble cause. And I never had a problem with the regime change in Afghanistan either. Their leaders publicly lined themselves up with Al Queda and Bin Laden after they attacked us. But history will have the final say.

Now we start a new era. I voted for Barack Obama. I believe he is going to be a much more centrist president than his voting record in Congress would indicate. I believe he is going to try to be a uniter, a bipartisan leader of the country. All his moves up to now point to that being the case.

But I am also a realist. He may succede and be a good president or he may not. I also know there are a lot of crazies out there and I fear for his and his family's safety. And I know the story of the Zen Master and the Little Boy, as told by Gust Avrokatos in "Charlie Wilson's War."

We'll see.

We made our delivery saturday in Wilmington OH, rested all day sunday and immediately got a load on monday picking up in Lexington KY and delivering into Washington DC monday night. Which we did and now it is tuesday and we accepted a job picking up in New Jersey going to two stops in western New York state. The ball keeps on bouncing.....