“I Am an Old Man and Have Known a Great Many Troubles, But Most of Them Never Happened”
Mark Twain
At the risk of creating any political discussion – – which is the last thing I want to do given Slope’s calm demeanor lately – – I was reflecting (in a very non-partisan way) about some of the scary Things That Were Probably Going To Happen with the outgoing administration which never took place after all. So much ink was spilled and so much breath was wasted on the following “sure things” (and I won’t even use the soon-to-be-former-President’s name; I’ll just use a pronoun):
- He was going to provoke a nuclear exchange with North Korea;
- By replacing a Supreme Court Justice just weeks before the election, he had a brilliant scheme to have them overturn the election in a 5-4 majority;
- He was going to pardon himself, creating a legal crisis;
- He was going to resign a day before his term ended, allowing his VP to grant him a bulletproof pardon;
- He was going to barricade himself inside the White House, compelling the government to extract him forcibly;
- There was going to be mayhem in the 50 state capitols across the United States (only actual result: tremendous amounts of overtime pay for security forces);
- He was going to fly Air Force One to Russia on his last day and be granted asylum there, from which he would run a new media empire.
Not to go absolutely treacle on you here, but I want to emphasize how not a single item above is me attacking the man; it is simply to point out how society at large got its collective panties in a bunch over all these hypotheticals, none of which came even close to transpiring.
What others can you remember?
