WASHINGTON, AUG.8—________________, the ___ President of the United States, announced tonight that he had given up his long and arduous fight to remain in office and would resign, effective noon tomorrow.

Although this lede from a top story in The New York Times ran exactly 32 years ago today, it is not entirely absurd to imagine the so-called newspaper of record publishing the same paragraph this morning just by filling the redacted blanks “Richard Milhouse Nixon” and “37th” with “George Walker Bush” and “43rd.”

A recapitulation of Bush’s “long and arduous fight to remain in office” presumably would follow. The highlights might include: his twice electorally dubious path to the White House; his flouting of both Constitutional and international laws; his dismissal, as invalid, of a memorandum entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States,” which he received in his August 6, 2001 daily briefing, while enjoying a month-long “working” vacation; his administration’s conscious neglect, again while the president was on vacation, to prepare adequately, or even at all, for one of the worst natural disasters in the country’s history.

Somewhere within this hypothetical news story or in a “news analysis” accompanying it, it would be noted that the president’s resignation had become inevitable this past March when his job approval rating, according to a CBS News poll, tanked to a breathtaking low of 29 percent. (The vice president, whom the nation understood was more accurately a co-president and quite possibly the de facto president rated a mere 18 percent, having recently shot a man in the face). Bush’s approval rating has recovered mildly since, but, as even cautious polls indicated, as of last week it remained stalled at around 40 percent.

The resulting opinion pieces would have easy pickings. The outgoing president, a former co-owner of the Texas Rangers, had tended throughout his political career to understand problems of all variety and scale in the fraternity-brother cum MBA’s lingua franca of professional sports (e.g. his comment during the 2000 campaign that Times reporter Adam Clymer was “a major league asshole”). No hack political commentator inclined to baseball metaphors (and not named George Will) could resist the opportunity to snicker upon Bush’s resignation that .400 is a Hall of Fame average for an MLB batter, but that 40 percent as an approval rating for a wartime commander in chief was something short of inspiring. Arguably, a man in his situation ought to have maintained at least a majority show of confidence if he wanted, as this president had repeatedly put it, to “stay the course”; the same locution his father, “41,” had adopted whenever his own numbers had looked wobbly. In the end, a clear majority of the nation had become convinced that the course to stay—namely the military occupation of Iraq—should never have been plotted in the first place, and it was this development, all the members of the Washington press corps would agree, that had finally brought down the Bush II reign.

Obviously, a version of this news story ran thirty-two years ago, but it will not run today. That’s a difference worth lingering over this morning. If history’s malfeasants were interchangeable, then history would have repeated itself and a 44th POTUS would be taking an oath of office this afternoon. Instead, a pattern has been disrupted.