Election Night much scarier than Halloween

In just a few days, it will be the scariest night of the year. No, I’m not talking about Halloween.

We have 17 more days of terror, uncertainty and dread to suffer through until the second Tuesday in November will is in the rearview mirror.

Then we get a brief respite, until we start a new four-year cycle of anxiety as our “best worst choice” candidate gets sworn into office in January.

Let’s assume that everyone is correct, both left and right, and whoever gets sworn in as president is the antiChrist and the end is nigh. To that proposition, all I have to say is “let’s get on with it.”

We’ve been falling apart as a country probably since at least 1777, and we hit the skids in 1860 when a third-party president became the first Republican elected to the highest office in the land.

Be that as it may, the decline seems to have really picked up speed during my paltry lifetime.

I came on the scene in the waning days of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, so I have no real memory of the 50s.

As a child in the 60s, however, I remember Lyndon Baines Johnson, a hero because he, like my family at the time, hailed from Texas.

I always felt LBJ got worn down by the Viet Nam War and probably all the nonsense that is Washington, D.C. Also seeing his predecessor shot dead probably was not exactly encouraging.

However, LBJ had some of the greatest quotes ever recorded.

“Being president is like being a jackass in a hailstorm. There’s nothing to do but to stand there and take it,” is one of my favorite LBJ quotes.

Then came Richard Nixon, and from 1968 on, the presidency seems to have been just been one never-ending train wreck.

The first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote was 1980s Jimmy Carter vs. Ronald Reagan match up.

I supported Carter because he was more or less a local candidate, hailing from Georgia, and he was a former Navy man, and I was an active duty Navy sailor at the time.

Besides, no one my age (I was 20) took Reagan seriously as a candidate. How was a third-rate, seemingly not-so-bright movie star going to beat an incumbent president who graduated from the United States Naval Academy and who was an engineering officer on one of the first nuclear submarines?

Luckily I didn’t bet my 1979 Chevy Chevette on the outcome of that race — Reagan stomped Carter by gaining 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49 votes. Reagan also topped Carter 43,901,812 to 35,483,820 in popular votes.

The Reagan dynasty stretched until 1992, including two Reagan terms and one forgettable George H.W. Bush presidency. Then another homegrown candidate (again, at least home-grown for Arkansans) swept into the White House.

We all know how the William Jefferson Clinton years went — basically it was the “Greed Is Good” decade. I didn’t really support “Free Willy” Clinton because, well, I had met him and like everyone else over 20 in the 1990s, I had heard the stories about the Arkansas State Police serving up an steady stream of women to Clinton.

But Clinton we got, eight years worth, until 2000 and George W. Bush swept into office and heralded in the end of the economy as we knew it.

Was Clinton responsible for the relative prosperity of the 90s, or was he just riding on the wave of programs initiated by Reagan? Did George W. really fly the U.S. Economy into the side of the proverbial mountain, or was that just the obvious result of Clinton’s rampant deregulation and cronyism?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Now we’re racing into to the closing minutes of the Barrack Obama presidency.

Whoever wins the Oval Office on Nov. 8, we have to ask ourselves how much of what they institute will actually affect us in the near term? Is it liable to be 2025 or beyond before we know what (God help us) eight years of Hillary or Donald will have wrought? (Or possibly worse — eight years of each?)

And what surprises will the next decade bring us as Obama’s legacy?

I see two probable scenarios ahead of us.

Scenario Number One, Hillary wins, and in eight years, America is one big crooked Chicago, thanks to all the dead voters who mysteriously rose from the grave to show up at the polls on election night.

Scenario Number Two, Donald wins, and in eight years, America is the Balkans, thanks to Secretary of State Vladimir Putin.

Vampires, zombies and werewolves have nothing on fright in store for us all, come Nov. 8.

As you head to the polls, remember these words of President Nixon, mark your ballot, then go home and get drunk — and do your best to stay that way until 2020.

“Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top — or on the bottom,” Nixon said.

“I guess I’m something of a fatalist,” Nixon added. “You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.”

Amen, Brother Richard. Amen.