I paraphrase very lightly a famous passage from The Great Gatsby:
cordially,
They were careless people, Bush and Cheney—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back to their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...But of course, we are all of us a careless people, who, distracted by ginned-up "scandals" and the ephemera of a glitzy celebrity culture, permitted a clique of grifters and criminals to seize hold of our affairs fourteen years ago. Our domestic misfortunes have been vast; the human cost abroad, staggering.
cordially,