I wish that I believed in God, so that I could imagine George W Bush on the Day of Judgment.

At long last, he is in a situation where money and connections can buy him no favourable treatment. Not even Karl Rove can talk him through the Pearly Gates. Instead he hears a voice of thunder. “You did evil and claimed to do My will. In My name, you blessed the rich and cursed the poor, you kept the mighty in their seats and cast down the humble and meek. In My name, you gave the moneychangers control of the temple of government. In My name, you destroyed my handiwork, you poisoned the earth which I gave you and all that therein is. In My name, you lied and bore false witness. In My name, you went to war without cause and without truth. In My name, you tortured and killed.”  Whimpering in his coward’s heart, George W is carried away by St Michael and a team of specially selected caustic angels and delivered as baggage to Lucifer…

We atheists can enjoy no such vision of an afterlife. We must imagine a fate for George W in this world. Perhaps he and his crew could be sent to Guantanamo. Since Donald Rumsfeld once described it as a summer vacation, they could hardly object. So let George W, and all those who connived and colluded in Guantanamo, endure the regimes they inflicted on its inmates.

It would be fitting, but equally unattainable. Barack Obama will abolish Guantanamo among the first acts of his Presidency, and even George W is entitled to the American liberties and legal rights which he has denied to others.

So what hell does await George W at the end of the squalid calamity of his Presidency? Only an existential one – of living on ignored and despised. Alone among modern ex-Presidents he attracts no offers of book deals or speaking engagements or well-paid advisorships. No one consults him or interviews him. Even the junta that put him into power – that coalition of arrogant ideologues, corporate crooks and religious fanatics – realize that they made a mistake. No one returns his telephone calls, not even Tony Blair.  He is not even wheeled out to go to state funerals, for no one wishes the United States to be represented with so little personal dignity.   There is no Presidential library for the books and papers he never read.  

Even if he wanted to, he cannot leave the United States for fear of arrest as a torturer and a war criminal. He cannot travel within the United States for fear of public execration: least of all can he risk visiting any of the small towns whose lifeblood was destroyed by his economic policies, whose children were maimed and killed in his unjust war. So George W holes up in that fake ranch in Crawford, Texas with nothing to do except destroy more vegetation. Occasionally he shuttles off to some other Bush family compound, sealed away from the taunts and curses of the American people he betrayed.  

Bush is not a reflective man and the greatest hell of these empty futile hours is to be forced to think: why did he ascend to a position so far above his character and abilities? Would he not have been happier running the Texas Rangers baseball team?

And when he takes his first drink of the day he can only stare at the bottle and ask: why, why, why did I ever give you up?