The Swiftees and John O'Neill's "Unfit for Command" largely turning the election to Bush. Red states and blue states, the "debates," metrosexuals, the Democratic implosion. "The Lord of the Rings" in an Oscar sweep; "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "The Passion of the Christ." The Statue of Liberty reopened. The flu vaccine hardly to be found. Baseball evidently returning to D.C., fittingly (there) on the taxpayers' backs.

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Exeunt RIP: Ronald Reagan. Pat Tillman. Czeslaw Milosz and Daniel Boorstin. Captain Lloyd Bucher and Adm. Thomas Moorer. Ray Charles and Lester Lanin. Julia Child and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. Sen. Hiram Fong. Alistair Cooke.

Yasser Arafat, Abu Abbas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Marlon Brando and Janet Leigh; Tony Randall and Peter Ustinov. Mary McGrory and Francoise Sagan. Richard Avedon. Estee Lauder. Jacques Derrida and Jack Paar. Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan.

XXX

The year's principal congratulations go to George Bush for what he did on freedom's behalf - aided by the likes of Pat Tillman, who put love of liberty above love of lucre and love of self. The alternative is to degrade liberty into license, with all the smarmy and culturally debilitating consequences - as Tom Wolfe describes so devastatingly, so depressingly, in his "I Am Charlotte Simmons."

Bush the reputed pinhead, the incoherent village idiot, just rocked on - re-empowered by the equally stupid American voter. He carried the battle into enemy territory - and prevailed. By far the most compelling novel of 2004, "Charlotte Simmons" recalls in contrast perhaps nothing quite so much as Wolfe's fellow novelist Saul Bellow's observation: "(My intention is) the rediscovery of the magic of the world under the debris of modern ideas."

Yes, in October the duration of America's involvement in Iraq became longer than our involvement in World War I. And yes, in the passing year variations on the very cultural excesses confronting Charlotte Simmons threatened to redefine the American family and to crush the cathedrals of long-estimable institutions such as the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant denominations.

But in 2004, precisely 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a Republican President named an African-American to succeed the first African-American secretary of state. And in 2005, though only a fool would say so absolutely, the nation behind George Bush just may get some solid new judges, and concrete reform of Social Security, and genuine tax simplification in the form of a national sales tax, a value-added tax, or a flat tax. Likewise, in Iraq - if the Shiites will get into the security game as they should, and if the Sunnis will give up their guns and get into the political game as they should - liberty just might take root there as well.