Thank you George W., our now past president, as wells as Messieurs Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and Mademoiselle Condi for ensuring the election of Barack Obama. Had your presidential terms been a little less bad, we may not have welcomed with such celebration the inauguration of our 44th President and the first African American to hold this office. We pay homage to all of you for creating the nightmare that aroused us from our sleep – a state we fell into some years ago. When we woke up we elected Barack Obama and now we promise to stay awake and restore what is right and true about America.
We are not sure how long ago or why we fell asleep. Perhaps it was due to our overindulgence in material riches or the desire for them, or to avoid our fears, or maybe it was our sense that everything would always and forever be okay in this great country. We forgot that we had to work to protect our freedom, our democracy and the privilege of being a world leader.
Then for eight years Bush and company created a nightmare so real and and so truly frightening that we awoke from our collective sleep. Had the Bush administration’s nightmare been just a little less bad, we may have stayed asleep or woken groggily as from an afternoon nap only to lay our heads down once again. But this eight year nightmare got worse and more frightening as the days, weeks and months passed. Then perhaps too slowly we started to wake up so we could bring an end to this scary dream. We decided it was better to be awake. In this state of awareness we have chosen as our leader a man who knows the gift we have in our democracy and who is asking us not only to stay awake but to contribute , get involved and take back our country and all that it stands for in order to move it forward. Thank you George W. and company for bringing us a dream so bad that it woke us from our sleep and brought us to hope and to work on behalf of that hope.