2008: Rod, Eliot, Yuck

Never a stickler for rhetorical ruffles and flourishes, the president simply said: "This sucker could go down." He was referring to the economy, which took the president's party down with it. In the second quarter, General Motors lost $181,000 a minute. Would you buy a used car company? Didn't think so. But in 2009, you probably will, if you are a taxpayer.

By 2010, you will be able to buy the plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt. Although it is designed to reduce America's dependency on foreign oil, a GM spokesman said: "There is a fear that if we position this as a 'pro-American' car, it will upset some of the environmentally conscious crowd." Heaven forfend.

If 2008 were not divisible by four, this would have been The Year of Gen. David Petraeus. During the presidential contest between an African-American from Chicago and a plumber from Toledo, eros reared its beguiling head, so: Coming soon to a Cineplex near you, "Republicans in Love," a romantic comedy about conservatives who advocate extravagant presidential powers and who this autumn favored putting the governor of a national park (the federal government owns 63 percent of Alaska) in close proximity to those powers.

Cuba being politically primitive, Fidel Castro yielded power to his brother. Caroline Kennedy, because she is a president's daughter, sought the gift of the Senate seat from New York that Hillary Clinton got because she married a president, but Andrew Cuomo, son of a New York governor, might get it, because this is a democracy.

Thanks to Rod Blagojevich, Eliot Spitzer, a.k.a. Client Nine, was only the second-most embarrassing governor. Actually, third-most, considering the lurid mismanagement of California. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, like Mrs. Jellyby in Dickens's "Bleak House," practiced "telescopic philanthropy." She neglected her chaotic family so she could devote herself to improving conditions in distant Borrioboola-Gha. With California chin-deep in red ink, Schwarzenegger summoned an international conference to tweak the planet's thermostat.

A San Francisco teacher's first graders went on a field trip to witness her lesbian wedding. In nearby Hayward, a teacher asked her kindergartners to sign cards pledging "not to use anti-LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] language or slurs." For some reason, Californians voted to define marriage as between a man and a woman. "This is not a matter for ridicule, this is serious," said Australia's health minister, whose department urged teachers not to mark grades with red pens because that color "can be seen as aggressive."