So here is my list of things from 2005 that I'd love to forget -- that, indeed, we'd all be better off if they never crossed our minds again:
- Bill Frist, video diagnostician. Bill Frist, stock market genius. Bill Frist.
- That drivers will soon have to take out a second mortgage before filling up at the gas pump.
- Bill O'Reilly's enemies list. That I wasn't on it (we'll try harder next year).
- That the president thought Harriet Miers was the most qualified candidate for the Supreme Court.
- That Harriet Miers thought George Bush was the most brilliant man she'd ever met.
- The passage of the morally bankrupt bankruptcy bill.
- That the New York Times held off running the NSA spying story for over a year.
- Being Bobby Brown: "Hell to the no!"
- The note President Bush passed Condoleezza Rice, asking if it was OK to take a bathroom break during a U.N. Security Council meeting.
- The missing $9 billion the U.S.-led occupation government in Iraq can't account for.
- Jeff Gannon, White House correspondent -- aka Jeff Guckert, hotmilitarystud.com.
- That there is a debate about whether waterboarding is actually torture.
- Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Viveca Novak: The Three Media Stooges of Plamegate.
- The Fred Durst sex tape.
- That 493 U.S. soldiers have died since Dick Cheney declared the insurgency was in its "last throes."
- That Dick "Five Deferments" Cheney was willing to go toe-to-toe with John "Five Years as a POW" McCain over the issue of torture.
- Jean Schmidt taking to the House floor and implying that Jack Murtha was a "coward."
- That voters could have gone to the polls in 2004 knowing that Bush was spying on Americans, that a key White House aide was charged with felonies, and that the initial reasons for invading Iraq were bogus -- but didn't, thanks to the timidity of the mainstream media.
- Tom Cruise vs. Brooke Shields
- Tom Cruise vs. Matt Lauer
- Tom Cruise vs. Oprah's couch
- That, in a '60s flashback, the Pentagon is once again spying on the activities of anti-war activists.
- Hillary Clinton's shameless attempts to rebrand herself as a red-state-friendly Democrat -- including her decision to sign on as a co-sponsor of an anti-flag burning bill.
- Hillary's visit to Iraq, where when she opined that suicide bombers are "an indication" of the "failure" of the insurgency, and that much of Iraq was "functioning quite well."
- Hillary taking on "Grand Theft Auto."
- Intelligent Design vs. Evolution.
- That Phil Cooney, an oil industry lobbyist turned White House official, did extensive rewrites on government reports to make it sound as if global warming weren't really that big a problem.
- Duke Cunningham's two defense contractor-provided 19th-century French commodes.
- That Paul Wolfowitz, one of the key architects of the war, has been successfully repackaged as the warm and fuzzy poverty-fighting president of the World Bank.
- That thanks to Bush budget cuts, one in five military families need food stamps or Women, Infants and Children program aid to get by.
- That China has become the second-largest holder of U.S. debt.
- That Democrats chose the insipid "Together, America Can Do Better" as their new slogan. And that they actually paid a messaging team to come up with it.
- Drilling for oil in ANWR (I've been desperately trying to forget this one since 2001, but the White House just won't let me).
- Bush strumming his guitar, Condi taking in Spamalot, and Cheney shopping for luxury digs -- all while New Orleans flooded.
- That Bush waited five days before visiting the Gulf following Katrina. And that once he got there, he joked about his hard-partying days, congratulated Mike Brown on doing a "heck of a job," and promised to rebuild Trent Lott's house.
- Brownie's resume -- especially his stint as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association.
- That About 40 percent of Mississippi's National Guard and 35 percent of Louisiana's -- a combined total of roughly 6,000 troops -- were unable to help out after the storm because they were in Iraq.
- That the first round of Katrina cleanup and reconstruction contracts went to that old gang from Baghdad: Halliburton, Bechtel, Fluor, and the Shaw Group.
- "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of levees." -- G.W. Bush
- "Now tell me the truth, boys, is this kind of fun?" -- Tom DeLay to young evacuees in the Astrodome
- "This is working very well for them." -- Former First Lady Barbara Bush on Katrina evacuees
- "If you'll look at my lovely FEMA attire, you'll really vomit. I am a fashion god." -- Mike Brown in an email sent in the immediate aftermath of Katrina
