Frank Rich has a brilliant final assessment of the Bush Administration’s towering failure, one that captures a certain loathsomeness in graphic detail:

Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

Rhetorically, this is the direct opposite of Hunter S. Thompson’s beautiful, shrieking “He Was a Monster” eulogy for Richard Nixon back in ‘94 (reprinted in Better than Sex). At the time, Thompson wrote:

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of the smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

It speaks to the shallowness of George W. Bush that he never really had a nemesis like Thompson. Clinton had dozens, from Newt Gingrich, to Rush Limbaugh, to Kenneth Starr. There is still a cottage industry in being Bill Clinton’s sworn enemy, and in the end they would all still go to bed with him given half a chance. Right now, there isn’t an American alive who would piss on George Bush if he was on fire.

But Rich’s description of Bush’s obliviousness and vanity doesn’t quite do justice to our current president’s premeditated, calculated destruction of the American will to govern itself. It was not simply that he cared only about himself. Certainly, he was a jealous little punk, but he came to Washington with an agenda, one that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, and a pack of cronies so single-minded and vicious that they couldn’t even be bothered to notice that an entire city was drowning.

Rich says, “Bush failed because in the end it was all about him,” and this is certainly true, if you are an American. But if you are one of the many multinational oligarchs that hunt with Dick Cheney, you can’t even see over your piles of money to read that sentence, let alone care about its implications. The foxes are in the process of leaving the hen house, or they would be if they could fit back out the door. It worked.

Nixon may have broken the heart of the American Dream, but George W. Bush broke its back.