Late this afternoon here in northern California — early evening back on the right coast — Decider George will bid his not-so-absolute farewell to a beleaguered nation, a crowd of US peoples itching for his face to disappear off any kind of radar.
The folksy speech, apparently, will continue the bullshit:

• The speech at 5 p.m. Pacific time will be before a small live audience, which is unusual for such White House goodbyes but suits Bush’s taste for personal interactions since he first campaigned (unsuccessfully) for public office, a House seat in West Texas, from the back of a pickup truck during his honeymoon.

And so it goes…

(Illustration found here).

The so-long-fare-thee-well speech scheduled tonight has received a lot of media play, from one perspective at CNBC to an op/ed in the New York Times yesterday, which included this delightful little snippet:

• The man has been saying goodbye for so long, he’s come to resemble one of those reconstituted rock bands that have been on a farewell tour since 1982. We had exit interviews by the carload and then a final press conference on Monday, in which he reminisced about his arrival on the national stage in 2000. “Just seemed like yesterday,” he said.
  I think I speak for the entire nation when I say that the way this transition has been dragging on, even yesterday does not seem like yesterday. And the last time George W. Bush did not factor into our lives feels like around 1066.

Cute, but a way-understatement.
US presidents starting with George Washington have usually given some kind of departing shot before exiting.
The last Republican to fare-thee-well the nation was Ronald Reagan (Decider George’s daddy didn’t give one, probably closeted-off somewhere crying) and then Gerald Ford, though, his speech was before a a joint session of Congress reporting on the State of the Union — now the 43rd and worst president in US history will attempt to charm one last time.

Ike Eisenhower’s speech might be the only modern-times incident where the words themselves carried much weight.
See a YouTube version of Ike’s speech here.
Eisenhower’s own dick VP, a guy named Nixon, lost the 1960 general election to John Kennedy, who of course, never had a chance to make a farewell speech, but did usher in the short-lived, delusional “Age of Camelot” and the former general’s now-famous “military-industrial-complex” resonates very-much so right to this right-now day.
When Ike gave the speech, his secretary of defense was also named Gates — Thomas S. Gates Jr., who “For a time, President-elect Kennedy considered him as a possible secretary of defense.”
No relation to the current Bob Gates, a Decider George holdover going into President-Elect Obama’s administration.

Most likely tonight’s speech by Decider George will be pathetic, even pitiful, except as Frank Rich wrote: “…until you remember how vast the wreckage is…” and chocked full of the same old revisionist legacy shit we’ve seen the last couple of months.
Be gone already!

Part 2 after the speech.