A little y2k chaos would have been nice, if you're a small government type:
BTW, Happy New Year!
ISSUE 1680 Friday 31 December 1999
Mark Steyn: It's King Clinton or President McKinley
By Mark Steyn
Y2K Newswire
Millennium bug - Action 2000
The Year 2000 Information Centre
Electronic Telegraph Y2K forum
IF my neighbours are correct, this will be the final Campaign 2000 dispatch I ever file. At midnight tonight a bored checkout girl in Cleveland will run a CheezWhip over the barcode scanner and accidentally trigger the launch codes of the entire North Korean nuclear arsenal.
The Y2K doom-mongers are advising citizens to stock up with enough food and water for four to six months. The federal government is advising stocking up for three to five days. Taking a compromise position, Wally, my town's emergency manager, wrote to all of us last month recommending we had supplies for at least 30 days.
Either way, I don't care. Like everyone else round here, I've got my generator. Got my well. Got my extra cord of wood for the burner. Got a big buck from the deer season hanging in the barn. Got my Telegraph cheque cashed and under the bed in small bills. Got my shotgun at the window to ward off looters. Got my Y2K survival video narrated by Leonard Nimoy of TV's Star Trek. I'm a small-government kind of fellow, so total societal meltdown suits me just fine.
Except for one small detail: according to the conspiracy guys, shortly after midnight, with planes dropping from the sky faster than Al Gore's poll numbers, Bill Clinton will leave his ghastly celebrity New Year gala, return to the Oval Office and declare martial law under executive order 18303. He could have got his Techie Vice-President, who recently claimed to have invented the internet, to fix the bug over a quiet weekend.
But he chose not to, for obvious reasons. As Free Republic spokeswoman Connie Hair puts it: "Why do you think some of the government agencies are dragging their feet about complying?" Because the more chaos, the more justification for seizing emergency powers. So long, Campaign 2000. Hello, Bill and Hillary's third term.
In Tennessee, Mac took time off from installing the concertina wire round his bunker to tell The American Spectator's Dave Shiflett that "Clinton will take this opportunity to make himself King". Mac expects he and others of his ilk will be quickly disposed of, but apparently prefers that to another five years of the Clinton administration. "I say bring it on. If things go bad, I say, let's all go to heaven."
Not all Republicans are ready to follow him. In the early days of Y2K panic, presidential candidate Steve Forbes routinely attacked Al Gore for failing to take the problem seriously. As National Journal headlined their cover story on Y2K losers, "Sorry, Al, this bug's for you". But Al's managed to dodge the bug and, on this issue if no other, finds himself in a win-win situation. If nothing happens, he'll be Mr Futurist again, representing the forces of progress against those Republican technophobes. If everything falls apart, President-for-Life Clinton will keep him on as Number Two.
Modestly inconvenient but non-life-threatening chaos of the kind foreseen by my neighbour Wally probably plays best for Republican candidate John McCain, who spotted the real danger posed by the bug: a potential $1 trillion liability in frivolous lawsuits. In other words, if Y2K didn't bring about economic collapse, the ensuing litigation would have. Senator McCain sponsored the Bill limiting Y2K class-action lawsuits and capping punitive damages.
But, as things have turned out, the real Y2K menace proved to be not technological but human: a succession of dodgy Algerians slipping across the 49th parallel from Canada with an assortment of passports and trunks loaded up with nitroglycerine. The terrorist threat from America's friendly neighbour to the north has already forced the mayor of Seattle to cancel the New Year celebrations at the city's Space Needle, a ridiculous structure that would benefit from being blown up. Another Algerian was detained at Beecher Falls, Vermont, the other day - the very border crossing I myself use - and there's now talk of cancelling all Y2K festivities in New Hampshire.
You may think I'm nuts to be greeting Y2K perched on top of a generator with a stockpile of ammo and a year's supply of Pop Tarts, but with New Year celebrations dropping like flies what else is there to do? The Canuck terror should have vindicated diminutive Christian activist and Republican candidate Gary Bauer, whose approach to every issue has been to cite what's happened in Canada and then warn it could happen here. But he's now got bigger fish to fry - the lesbians who've managed to persuade the Vermont Supreme Court to rule in favour of some kind of formally recognised legal union. "Gay marriage" in Vermont is, says Mr Bauer, a bigger threat to the US than terrorism.
So pretty much everyone's staying in tonight, cowering under the window sill while Algerian terrorists, Vermont lesbians and fanatically loyal Clinton feds roam the landscape. If only the Y2K bug was true: we'd wake up tomorrow, it would be January 1900, President McKinley would be in the White House, and all would be well. Happy New Year.
telegraph.co.uk
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