I still have hard time coming to grips with the fact that it's almost over.

In just a few days, George W. Bush will no longer be president and I will finally be able to breath a sigh of relief. It's as if a long, eight-year nightmare has come to an end.

As happy and proud as I am that Barack Obama will be sworn in as our next president, at times that joy is overwhelmed by the thought that Bush will be gone.

There is a laundry list of reason that I, and many others believe Bush will go down as the worst president in this country's history. Katrina, Iraq and the demise of civil liberties are usually tops on the list. But I feel that this man and the people he surrounded himself with while in office committed much greater crimes than those.

They tore our country apart along idealistic lines not for the good of the country but to keep themselves in power. They demonized those who spoke out against them. They used fear and hatred to keep people in line and the same fear and hatred to keep organized opposition in check.

They threw civility out the door and degraded discourse into who could shout the loudest. They used people's faith as a control mechanism. They honed their use of religion as a weapon and used the vilest of men such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Fallwell and so many other "men of god" as their foot soldiers to keep people angry and fired up.

It didn't matter who the enemy was. It could be Middle Easterners, gays, the media, the "liberal elite." Just as long as they had an enemy they could keep people afraid and tossing them their votes and money.

I don't know how much of this was actively orchestrated by Bush. I tend to think it wasn't a lot. But he turned to people like Karl Rove for his dirty tricks and let people like Dick Cheney use him and his machine for their own interests while disguising it all as what was best for the country.

He knew what was going on around it and whether he set the ball in motion or just went along for the ride, the blame he carries for all their evil deeds is the same.

Some people say all politics is the same. It's all dirty and all corrupt and all deserving of our contempt. Maybe so, but, as Dante told us, there are levels to hell and there are levels as to how dirty and corrupt politics is. It's up to each individual as to how dirty they will get.

I have hope that we're ushering in a new era in our country and that we are in for a positive change. But at least I know, it can't be as bad as the past eight years have been.