Was Mondale ever even anywhere close in the polls?

I said that we would become a police state and would legalize torture after the Patriot Act was passed in 2001, and I was shouted down for my "hyperbole". I still get people who claim we do not live in a de facto police state and get dismissive or angry when I point out we do.

My worldview that saw the worst was becoming possible started in 1991 when Vichy Dems allowed Clarence Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall.

At this point, nothing is off the table: Concentration camps, economic collapse, environmental implosion, and nuclear war are all possible.

Frightened people are highly dangerous and unpredictable, and the populace lives on a constant diet of fear these days. It will not end well.

Obviously "sadly you were proven wrong" applies to neither of these.

Raising the drinking age to 21. I figured everyone would lower it to 18 eventually, not raise it. Of course, Reagan had the power to punish states that refused back in those days. So he got his way.

Random DUI checkpoints. If you had predicted that a few short years earlier, everyone would have called you nuts and said the people would explode if something like that was tried.

"No-knock warrant" getting through the Supreme Court. Even the Republicans who passed it into law admitted it was unconstitutional at the time. Everyone could see this except for the felonious five.

The spate of blue chip bankruptcies in the '80s. So many huge entities that had existed for decades went belly up.

The list for the Reagan era is pretty much endless. There is a reason, despite him being far less Conservative than the modern Republican, he is so populare with Conservative Republicans. He drastically changed the trajectory of this country in many areas.


The Internet. I ran a global computer network in 1992. It was a nightmare of mismatched equipment and software. So when Al Gore made the creation of "an informational superhighway" the core of his vice presidential campaign that year, I took notice. I didn't think there was a chance in hell of it working. Both Microsoft and IBM were notorious about not wanting to play well with others. I assumed they would refuse to build in compatibility with such a creature. Glad to have been wrong.

W winning re-election was mind boggling given that he screwed up pretty much everything he touched in his first term.

I always thought the book 1984 was absurd until 9/12/2001 when "bet you're glad your guy didn't win now" was seen as a legitimate statement despite the fact that their guy mocked our guy less than a year earlier for claiming that Jihadi terrorism was a serious national threat.

He's only teased us before, and I still think he's teasing, but I didn't think he'd even officially begin.