Well, It's 2006!

Who would ever have imagined humanity would make it this far. Virtual reality helmets and flying cars and time travel and teleportation and replicants and interstellar travel! Incredible. And does anyone else really love this new Soylent Green stuff? Man, that's delicious...Can't imagine what they make it out of, considering the massive food shortage we're suffering from in this grim dystopian futureworld.

But, all joking aside, has anyone else noticed how much the new century resembles that dumb old century we just got out of? I mean, there's gas shortages and a scandal about how the president was secretly recording his enemies' conversations...Could the world be any more fucking 70's?

Anyway, I don't quite know how to wrap up an entire year's events. In fact, I generally find attempts to tie up an entire year's worth of news stories into some sort of over-arching "theme" is really stupid. I mean, lots of stuff happened, but life doesn't really ascribe to any sort of 365-day calendar system. Things happen all the time and they don't neccessarily line up in neat chronological order to be scrutinized by number.

Take smarmy, mainly incoherent warblogger Andy Sullivan. In his TIME Magazine "Summarize 2005" piece, he makes the case that this was the year "we," as a people, started to question George Bush's policies. Wait...was this maybe his "Summarize 2001" piece and it was accidentally republished?

2005 was the year we stopped going along. We gave up blind trust and demanded real accountability. We finally had it with a war in which Bush's bromides didn't even begin to match the facts on the ground. We wanted answers and detail and a plan for victory.

2005 was the year we stopped going along? Where you been, man? I started this blog in late 2004, and by that point, most sane people had already gone hoarse from shouting out against this stupid Iraq misadventure.

I like also that now, Andrew agrees with us that George Bush is a poor leader, but still insists we were wrong to question him about the need to go to war in Iraq. Back then, we were technically correct, but still somewhow shrill and unreasonable. The appropriate time to begin questioning the man who brought us into war in early 2003 was 2004, for some reason.

We began to get one in the past month or so, as the President finally started to give more candid speeches in front of general audiences, even taking unscripted questions! He acknowledged "setbacks" in Iraq and wrong prewar intelligence, predicted violence ahead, asked for persistence and cited tens of thousands of civilian Iraqi deaths.

It was a strange kind of relief, but relief it was.

Does anyone feel comforted and relieved by Bush's most recent bullshit "turning a corner" speech aside from Andrew? Is his man-crush on the Chimp in Chief really so intense that he will continue to defend this asshole?

I could take on the whole Andy article, but who gives a shit? You get the point. It's dumb to go through 2005 and try to make up some thesis about what it all meant. It didn't mean shit. A bunch of stuff happened. A few things were good, like the defeat of Intelligent Design in Dover, PA and the indictment of Tom DeLay and Star Wars: Episode III. Most were bad, like Hurricane Katrina and Bill Frist declaring Terri Schiavo alive and well on the Senate floor and Fantastic Four. That's how it goes every year.

One post it's really worth your time to read, however, is World O'Crap's Ultimate Wingnut Awards. Informative and funny stuff. Pastor Swank, who has appeared previously on Crushed By Inertia, comes in Second Place!

(And, as long as I've brought up notable 2005 movies, everyone go read Larry David's very funny take on Brokeback Mountain from the New York Times today.)