This made the rounds of the Internet some time ago but it’s worth remembering. Upon Bush’s election, satirical online newspaper The Onion wrote a piece called “Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over”. They published it on January 17th, 2001. In the Onion’s typical style, over the top with a straight face, it was supposed to come across as humorously cynical, like most of their pieces. Instead it turned out to be more prescient than provocative.

The original article is here. Someone else took it and marked it up with hyperlinks to the real news as it happened. This second page has a lot of problems: many of the links are dead, and others are not to simple reporting but to other humor or op-ed pieces written by those with their same agenda.

Despite the bias, however, it’s astonishing to realize that The Onion, in attempting to overreach for humorous effect, basically got it right. It’s disquieting to feel like one is living in a punch line. Or a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie.