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Early in 1998, the second President Buchanan in American history leaned back at his desk in the Oval Office, lit a long Honduran cigar, and pondered the ups and downs of his first year in office.
The American people sure are peculiar,
he
muttered to no one in particular. I ran hard against the
left-wing liberal-dominated media, and hell, I was making
$800,000 a year from those same media. You'd think the
public would have figured out that if the media truly were
so liberal, nobody ever would have heard of me or Rush
Limbaugh, and Steve Forbes would be an unknown
pauper.
Buchanan allowed himself a chuckle, then examined a depressing memorandum on trade policy.
His early moves had backfired. Tariffs on Asian goods had raised the prices for consumer electronics to unaffordable levels, and beads of sweat formed on Buchanan's brow as he recalled the VCR riots in the summer of 1997. They had to call out troops to quell that one, and then there were all those category-killer home-electronics stores that had to close, putting thousands of people out of work.
But people got over it. Trouble was, now that families had to talk to each other, rather than just watch the TV set that was broken and the family couldn't afford a replacement, they didn't get along all that well. The divorce and desertion rate had soared and kids were running away from home.
As if that weren't enough, the business community opened up with both barrels when the street price of a low-end laser printer jumped from $400 to $900 and there was a booming black market in memory chips, to where they had to pull troops away from policing decency on the Internet and send them out on the streets to put away the thugs who were selling smuggled DRAMs.
The Dow had plunged to under 2500 and was still falling. Capital was fleeing the country, probably to Zurich, and Buchanan pondered export restrictions but wondered where he would find the personnel to enforce them.
Raising tariffs had also caused other countries to retaliate against American goods, with the result that American farmers lost their foreign markets.
The country faced a glut of wheat and soybeans even as thousands of family farms were foreclosed, and the resurrected American Agriculture movement planned yet another tractorcade to Washington next week.
Surprisingly, this gave Buchanan considerable support
from some factions of the environmental movement, even
though he laced his speeches with denunciations of
grungy gals in sandals and beads that worship
dirt.
But the dirt-worshipers pointed out that reduced farm production in the American heartland meant reduced use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, thus improving water quality. And the reduction in available grain stocks meant increased death rates and decreased birth rates in much of the Third World, thus providing a solution to world-wide population growth.
To some degree, Buchanan's educational reforms had fared better. A few retirements on the Supreme Court gave him enough appointments to get a majority that upheld the constitutionality of the Required Public School Prayer Act of 1997.
That had been enough to get godless liberals to support vouchers so that they could send their children to private schools that somehow functioned without prayer or DARE. Even in this short interval, test scores had risen substantially. Kids did not want to foul up in private school, lest they be sent to public school where they'd have to kneel all the time and get their hands whacked by ruler-wielding teachers.
That hadn't quite been what President Buchanan had in mind when he pushed for the prayer law, but he'd take his improvements where he could find them.
Out west, the news was worse than dismal. The 200-mile wall along the Mexican border, along with the machine-gun crews to stop illegal immigration within six months, had gone over well at first.
Labor supporters liked the public-works aspect of the wall, and without immigrants who's work for less than minimum wage, fruit-pickers and nannies started to earn a living wage in California.
But then an American military border patrol strayed
across the border. The Mexican government called it an
act of war
and retaliated by mobilizing its armed
forces and threatening an invasion of the American
southwest to reclaim the sacred Mexican soil stolen by
the gringo invaders of 1846.
Buchanan had scoffed at this little brown army,
but the whole area teemed with subversives who aided the
invaders after the Mexican government promised health
care, great food, Negra Modelo for 25 cents a bottle, no
official language and a guaranteed siesta -- some call it a
power nap -- every afternoon for every citizen.
The President appealed to citizens. Don't wait for
orders from headquarters. Ride to the sound of the
guns.
He wasn't about to make the mistake of the first President Buchanan, and let somebody else be in charge of a civil war.
END OF COLUMN
NOTE: Somebody tell Kisling that Al Packer was never
charged with, tried for, or convicted of cannibalism. He
was convicted of murder, not cannibalism, in his first
trial in Lake City. That verdict was set aside by the state
supreme court because the General Assembly had forgotten to
include, in its list of state crimes, murders committed
when Colorado was a territory. In his second trial, Packer
was convicted of manslaughter, not cannibalism. For that
matter, cannibalism has never been a crime in Colorado,
unless it comes under desecrating a corpse.
END OF NOTE
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