And yet, I can’t help but think that if Obama were not president, American foreign policy would be even worse. Given his rhetoric over the past eight years, it seems clear his 2008 Republican rival John McCain might have sent 20,000 ground troops back to Iraq to fight ISIS, and then another 25,000 ground troops to fight as ISIS allies in Syria. Although, there’s a chance we would have been relieved of that particular shame by now, since President McCain might have gotten America vaporized in a thermonuclear exchange over the integrity of Ukraine’s border. When you put it that way, I guess we should be glad at the relatively middling trail of human dead and the overall manageability of the geostrategic disasters Obama bequeaths to us.

But we have to close the book on this era of meh-feelings. We have to contemplate America after Obama. An America where a debauched liar’s foreign policy includes dipping bullets in pig blood and sending octogenarian billionaires to renegotiate trade with China. Or where a desiccated liar’s domestic policy is dictated by the speaking fees it will generate her family’s globalist grifting scheme, with the aim of making herself an octogenarian billionaire.

Obama, don’t leave me. I’m going to miss the America of beer summits and Joe Wilson shouting “You lie.” They weren’t the best of times, but they weren’t the worst of them either.