A Public Apology To My Readers

24 hours. If you are a regular reader of this space, you know that I have led the charge in educating you all about the catastrophe that is about to befall us. I have done this because I don’t want any of you to be caught unawares, insufficiently prepared for the coming apocalypse. In this effort I have been aided immeasurably by the White House press office, Mr. Carney, as well as several cabinet members who have detailed the tremendous damage about to be done to our beloved country by the sequester. This morning however, I must confess that a great confusion has washed over me as I read the latest overnight reports coming out of Washington.

My administration sources have almost daily been warning of starving children, teachers receiving pink slips, 700,000 layoffs, dead in the water aircraft carriers, senior citizens thrown out on the streets, long lines at the airports, airplanes spinning out of control for want of air traffic controllers, meat rotting for want of inspectors, crucial life changing scientific discoveries scrambled beyond recognition, and worst of all…delayed tax-refund checks. All of this I have faithfully communicated to you so you would be without excuse come the first of March. But now oddly, less than 24 hours before Armageddon, a confusing inconsistency has emerged, a note of ambivalence, a hedging of bets, a dialing back of rhetoric. Naturally, I am perplexed by the stunning, abrupt change in tone.

Now, we are being told that perhaps, there may not be quite as many (if any) starving children, apparently the total number of teachers receiving those pink slips turns out to be 7 in a county somewhere in West Virginia. Now, we are also being told that maybe the 700,000 number of layoffs might not be immediate after all. Those long lines at the airport may not materialize either, and it appears that money has been scraped together to insure that those air traffic controllers stay on the job, same thing with the aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea. I learn all of this new information from “policy experts” who now are saying that the public may not even notice any impact for weeks or even months. Somebody named Loren Adler of the Bipartisan Policy Center is quoted in The Hill newspaper saying, “The key takeaway is that on March 1^st no doors will be shut, no lights will go out. It will take awhile for these cuts to take effect.”

Well. I certainly feel sheepish. In my morning roundup of news sources about the sequester, gone are adjectives like “massive, draconian, severe, devastating”. Now, less than 24 hours before zero hour, I’m reading descriptive adjectives like “nuanced, complicated, and a new formulation…expectation reassessment”. I simply don’t know what to say. It would appear that I have been duped. Here I’ve been warning all of you about the coming end of days, only to discover at the very last minute that nothing is going to happen on March the first…nothing.

Needless to say, this has been a humbling experience indeed. The notion that responsible people throughout our government would try to manipulate me with false warnings of financial collapse to score cheep political points has been a bitter pill to swallow.

Well, on the bright side, there’s plenty of milk in the fridge, bread in the pantry, and I want have to buy batteries for years.