DURST: The Trial of the Century
Gentlemen; start your engines, because the partisan flag is down and here it comes swerving towards the fast track... the Trial of the Century! Totally different than that last Trial Of The Century a couple of years ago which involved some silliness with a football player and had rather mixed results. And the eight or nine other Trials of the Century before that which usually had at least something tangentially to due with criminal activity.But not this one. No, this TOTC will definitely earn its monumental moniker unless of course... it doesn't or something extraordinarily unseemly happens in the next 328 days. We can only hope. This TOTC began with Strom Thurmond remaining upright only with the Grace of God and a really strong stool stiffener as he administered the oath to Chief Justice Rehnquist, who then turned to the Senate and flapped his robes like a raven overdosing on steroids screeching: "Let's Get Ready To Rumble!" All right, he didn't but he should have. I wonder if Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase had to worry about the Senate Pro Tem slobbering all over him at the Trial of the 19th Century, 130 years ago. And how did Thurmond vote in that one?But now the entire country is in for an E ticket political ride. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy TOTC. Thank God all this isn't going on next year. Be awfully hard to convince the press you were just plain lucky having a TOTC in the Century's first year.On this the last second-Friday-in-January-of-the-Millennium, I remain Will Durst.
