Dear President Bush,

Thanks for being a uniter, not a divider. And thanks for sticking to your guns about not getting involved in "nation building". Because that's obviously for saps. Real Americans destroy nations; they don't build them up. Last but not least, thanks for torturing in our name, because we were probably too scrupulous and principled to do it ourselves.

Actually, I do have one final word of thanks. Thanks from all of us losers who can look back on your two terms and realize that they too may one day "fail upwards". Your failure in the oil business, followed by relative lack of failure owning the Texas Rangers (a beacon of mediocrity, I'm sure you'd agree), didn't get you down, at least not so far down that you couldn't aspire to be governor of Texas. You were actually better than our current governor, so I'm kind of nostalgic for the 1990s when you were guv. Except that it was better right before your term when that blue-haired old lady was governor. But I don't want to get off track. I want to close by thanking you for setting the bar so low for presidential expectations. In foreign policy, a president now has merely to avoid starting a costly war against a vastly inferior opponent to seem more prudent than you. In the economic arena, he or she merely has to appoint competent regulators and mention that maybe Americans ought to save and invest in infrastructure and education, and that maybe markets don't always regulate themselves.

In closing, Thank you thank you thank you, George W. Bush. You've set a new standard for executive branch dereliction of duty, one that we all hope is not equalled for many decades to come. That's what I call making your mark on history. Attaboy!