So, the polls are telling us that the scales are finally falling from the eyes of a fraction of people who voted for George W. Bush. Perhaps even some of those who voted for him twice.

To those of us who saw nothing wrong with eight years of peace and prosperity in 2000, and who saw everything wrong with Bush’s social and fiscal policies and an immoral war predicated on lies in 2004, there is no great epiphany in the quagmire of Iraq, the ethical and moral outrage of RoVakgate (the Valerie Plame affair), the dismal cronyism revealed by Katrina, the unravelling of DeLay’s corrupt empire, etc., etc.

But the question now is, what do we do with the mess Bush will leave us with? I think the answer is: Rub our noses in it. People, if you vote like fools for fools, there’s going to be a hell of a cleanup afterwards.

The prime example is Iraq. We have a moral obligation to fix that benighted country, now that we’ve dismantled it. As Colin Powell famously said, “You break it, you own it.” We have as a nation to own up to our responsibility to fix what Bush broke, because WE LET HIM BREAK IT!

Similarly, we’re going to have to raise taxes to arrest Bush’s slide toward feudalism. Yes, tax the rich. And the rest of us, too. It’s either that or leave our children a grossly unbalanced economy and social structure.

That’s one of the downsides of democracy: We are responsible for what our government does. Never has the lesson been clearer or more immediate than what Bush has delivered.

Thus, we have a great opportunity for a good old-fashioned civics lesson. This isn’t make believe. You can’t believe something simply because it makes you feel good right now. You can’t pretend that the country’s biggest problems are gay marriage and abortion. You can’t pretend that invading Iraq will make us safer. (Why the hell did we invade Iraq again? Oh, yeah, it was a neocon experiment gone very, very wrong.) If you scratch the poison ivy, you’ll get an infection!

In 2000,and again in 2004, many Americans accepted a childish, fairy tale view of the world and the role of government in our lives. Sadly many still do. But, finally some people are pulling their thumbs out of their mouths and asking, “What the hell just happened?”

It’s time to remind them that the right question is: “What the hell did we do?”