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It's dogs I really for sorry for. For us it was eight years, but for them it was fifty-six - although as America's poodle it has felt like fifty-six years to us also. For Barney in particular, being dropped on his head every afternoon, it must have been an unimaginable hell and for him the pain will continue in Dallas instead of Washington, for the rest of us the healing can begin.

After eight long years, the leader of the free world and our new master, is finally going to be someone who can speak in coherent sentences and manage a bag of pretzels without choking himself. A man who has some degree of appreciation for the value of human life and an intelligence and poise befitting his position as the most powerful man in the entire galaxy.

For Bush a life of alcohol and shooting beer cans off a fence at his ranch in Dallas awaits. He'll be happier this way, I doubt he ever really wanted to be President in the first place. For Dick Cheney, probably a clandestine escape to Argentina like Adolf Eichmann before he's indicted for war crimes. Speaking of whom, I was watching a documentary about Auschwitz-Berkenua recently and although Bush and Cheney didn't succeed in an attempt to exterminate an entire people, their remorselessness at the loss of life they caused is the same.

You wonder how they all could have behaved so inhumanely, but being in a position where you're able to determine the fate of so many people must be an intoxicating level of power. They were all playing God and humanity is entirely subordinate to divinity. Humanity is a human inconvenience - divinity means no consequences, no repercussions and no accountability or justification for your actions because you're your own judge.

The only morsel of solace I ever felt during the last eight years was that I might be entirely wrong about there being no God and all of them would be judged eventually by him - or failing that they might be abducted by Islamic extremist snatch squads and hanged live on You Tube. I won't lie to you, I preferred the latter option.

Anyway, I digress; today, the day after Martin Luther King day and forty-six years after his "I have a dream speech," we will witness a piece of ideological alchemy. The baseness of the Bush doctrine transformed into philosophical gold by the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Nothing will change over night of course. People may treat him like a messiah but he's been quite insistent that everyone fully understand there can be no miracles. Bush has successfully bankrupted the entire globe financially and morally, but we can at least begin the reciprocal course back to a different and better time in the hope that we have not traveled too far and become lost forever. At least it is safe to dream again now the nightmare is over. Hopefully without having to wait forty or fifty years to see them realised.