When the history of the past eight years is written, it will not make the official records that a Walmart temp was trampled to death in a rush of customers yesterday but it serves as a tragic little coda to my impressions of the Bush years. When the President told people that it was patriotic to shop in the face of a recession, he did not cause this. Yet the elevation of blind spending as a pass time has gotten so bad that yesterday people crushed a man to death so they could save eighty dollars on an LCD TV. To my mind that deserves at least as much soul searching as the current financial crisis.