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The stock market is plummeting, unemployment is up, the Middle East is ablaze, relations with the former Soviet Union are hitting new lows, we're told there is an energy crisis and many economists are predicting a recession.
And, coincidentally perhaps, a guy named George Bush lives in the White House.
Look, we like nostalgia as much as the next guy. But the eerie sense of deja vu currently blanketing our country like a fog harkens back to a time we're frankly not nostalgic for--1989.
That golden year. The President Bush we had then presided over a national malaise so severe that people ended up going out and electing Bill Clinton.
And we all know what a nightmare that was. Why, do you know that one time President Clinton took a girl into a closet and, well, we won't discuss that here.
Nineteen eighty-nine. Of course, that was before Monicagate, Koreagate, Travelgate, Whitewater and other nonsense dominated the national discourse. Journalists and Congressional committees had bigger fish to fry. The running of a secret war in Nicaragua by a rogue lieutenant colonel operating out of the White House basement, for example, double-digit unemployment or the plight of the family farmer.
Oddly, it all never came to much. Congress didn't have to impeach George Bush pere after his first term because the American people did it themselves, at the polling booths. And poor old George--born, famously, with a silver foot in his mouth--didn't even have a brother who was governor in a key state who could fix the election for him.
In case our current President doesn't realize, the honeymoon is most definitely over. He managed to stay out of the spotlight for a couple months as the Clinton-fixated media continued to chase after Bill and Hill, but those days are done.
Most presidents are given the benefit of the doubt during the first year or so of their term by good-natured Americans who concede that, while their guy might have lost, a majority of their countrymen have spoken. Such is not the case with George W., who, by every account, lost the national election and was elected president by five members of the Supreme Court.
While he hasn't been in office for three months, his course seems clear. To quote Bette Davis, fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night.