A New Year! The holiday season is now firmly behind us and we return our limp credit cards to our emptied wallets and once again freewheel down the slippery slope of political discourse.

In keeping with the season your W Team made a conscientious effort to forestall undesired enlightenment as to current affairs--"Enough," we said, tossing another copy of the National Review into the fireplace, "Is enough." And so, with blind eye, deaf ear, and upturned nose we showed our backs to all forms of political intelligence--if that is the correct phrase.

Prominent in our disregard were newspapers, political journals, televised commentaries and indeed all other forms of fiction. Instead we reveled in the festive lights, played our rooty-toot-toots and rummy-tum-tums, and wassailed until our eyes crossed.

But such frothy delights do not sustain, and we soon hungered for the strong meat of government. And, despite our sabbatical intentions, we noted the ever-shortening daylight hours and remembered that societies more primitive than our own (oh, there were so!) once sought to allay their fears of the darkness through ritual immolation their leaders. We shuddered at the thought that our own Defender of the Realm might even then be winging his way skyward as a smoky offering to the gods.

You may imagine our relief upon returning to find that the President had negotiated the Winter Solstice without significant alteration and was uncompromised by blade or flame.

However, we were shortly to learn that while the National Quarterback still had control of the ball, the playing field had undergone considerable permutation.

Our first indication that all was not well came with the news that the unfortunate Trent Lott--a man we know to be every bit as intelligent and engaging as his hair--had suffered a series of reverses resulting from a faux pas committed during a birthday celebration for the Methuselan Senator Strom Thurmond, (R-Babylon).

On that occasion Mr. Lott, perhaps due to something in the punch, flung wide the windows of his soul and released the tiny, featherless opinion that the presidential election of 1948 should have gone to Mr. Thurmond. Senator Thurmond is a man who has never lacked for clean white sheets, and Mr. Lott became a convert to his candidacy when he learned that "Jim Crow" was not an actual person and for that reason could not be elected.

In continuance of its insane vendetta against Right-thinking Americans, the liberal press viciously quoted Senator Lott verbatim.

The resulting fracas all but obscured concurrent revelations of the centenarian birthday boy's mind-boggling history of sexual scandal. It appears that as a young man in the Pre-Cambrian Era, Mr. Thurmond had spent a great deal of time in bed, without receiving much in the way of rest--a excess of licentiousness that at first struck us as being...well, rather un-Republican, until we remembered that he began his career as a Democrat.

At the height of the controversy, the increasingly desperate Mr. Lott threatened to resign from the Senate if he were deprived of the Majority Leadership, thus raising the specter of another razor-thin Republican majority and the danger of imminent reversion to Democratic rule. In the end he was persuaded to reconsider his options in the light of the burning crosses on his lawn.

Next we learned that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who had demonstrated excessive zeal in determining the actual cost of the planned Iraqi war, had been summarily stripped of his epaulets and remanded to the custody of the unemployment office. Mr. O'Neill is now a non-person in the witness protection program, residing somewhere on the outskirts of Reykjavik.

Then we learned that former Vice President Al Gore--a man who is just as good at counting as the next person--had decided to remove his name from presidential contention. Mr. Gore presumably felt that it is harder to get kicked in the stomach if one is walking away.

And now we discover that the Boston Archdiocese is officially Lawless.

But perhaps the most significant vanishing occurred within the body politic. Given the complexities and frustrations resulting from its attempt to quell international terrorism and bring the Al Quaedic archfiends to justice, the Bush administration has shrewdly decided to ignore both problems, concentrating instead on eliminating those elements of the American political infrastructure that inadvertently support and encourage terrorism. These include the freedoms of speech and press, the right of assembly, and the right to due process, among others.

Now let's see anyone try to take advantage of those babies again!

In sum, these changes seem to us a direct result of the massive Republican victories in the last election. All politics is, of course, a process of trade, and we suppose it would be jejune to cavil at the result. But we are nevertheless particularly saddened by Mr. Lott's devolution. It was a shabby trick to play upon an erstwhile hero. We recall that it was men of the Mississippi Senator's stripe (and we think he'd look nifty in stripes!) who represented a new electoral base, and certainly Mr. Lott was the basest of them all.

So now the Senate is to be Frist in war, Frist in Peace, and, we imagine, Frist in the hearts of its countrymen. But it won't be the same without the old Trentster at the helm. He was a man of extraordinary commonness, a giant of the smaller kind, and we shall miss him fiercely.

He was the life of the party.