That was 2006: The Year of the Sneer

Alex Johnson Reporter • Profile

If you’re about to be hanged, you can go several ways in choosing your last words.

There’s the “O [Deity of Choice] protect my soul” route.

There’s the “no, no I don’t want to die!” routine.

There’s the put-on-a-brave-face, “I have but one life to give” play to the historians.

Saddam Hussein chose the fourth way: I spit in your face.

The Iraqi government and the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq were denied the spectacle of the bloody tyrant’s going to his death as a broken figure of defeat. Instead, when Saddam went to the gallows two days before the end of the year, he did so defiantly rejecting a hood to hide to his face and spewing invective at his conquerors and captors.

Irascible to the end, Saddam met his fate with a sneer. There was a lot of that in 2006.

Oh, Dick
End-of-the-year pop quiz:

Which of the following did not happen in 2006?

• The vice president of the United States shot a man in the face. The family of the man who was shot apologized.
• The vice president of the United States was named as a witness in a federal investigation, putting him on track to become the first vice president ever to testify at a criminal trial.
• The vice president of the United States said anyone who voted for a Democratic Senate candidate would be encouraging “the al-Qaida types who want to break the will of the American people.”
• It was revealed that the vice president of the United States insists that all television sets in hotel rooms he uses be preset to Fox News Channel.

Silly you. You know you can’t trust the liberal media. We fooled you — all of those things happened in 2006 to Dick Cheney, whose gray visage floated, like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon, over the Year of the Sneer.

When former President Gerald Ford’s great big heart finally gave out after 93 years, his death reminded us that there once was a time of we’re-all-in-this-together bipartisan commonality in this country. But no more. Threaded throught the eulogies to the accidental president who bound the nation’s wounds after the Watergate scandal was an odd sense of nostalgia: He was a nice guy. How quaint.

Same to you, pal
Golly, it was a mean year, punctuated by as nasty a political campaign as you could ever imagine.

Take the vice president’s bilious dismissal of Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont. Meanwhile, in Tennessee, the folks at the Republican National Committee financed an ad suggesting that Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. was a black, race-mixing, Mob-connected, black serial skirt-chaser (and did we mention he was black?). And in Wisconsin, a Republican House candidate accused his Democratic opponent of favoring prostitution and child sexual abuse.

For a moment or two, it seemed as if the wind was blowing with the vice president, who by all accounts was being eased aside as the big boys of the first Bush presidency trundled in to clean things up.

But when all the votes were counted, frogs fell from the sky and locusts swarmed the Capitol. The Democrats — last seen whirling around in full Curly woob-woob-woob mode after losing two years ago to one of the most unpopular presidents in modern history — won control of the House and the Senate.

(Check that. They won control of the House, and they thought they had won control of the Senate. Then a little-known Democratic senator named Tim Johnson suffered something very like a stroke. If, in the new year, Johnson decides he has to resign [or dies], the Senate will likely be locked in a flat 50-50 tie. The vice president would hold the tie-breaking vote. The vice president, of course, is Dick Cheney.)

MORE FROM 2006 YEAR IN REVIEW

2006 Year in Review Section Front

The Year of the Sneer Slide show: Final Curtain Calls 2006 See most clicked stories of 2006 — and vote Will 2007 be a happy year for travelers? Joe Scarborough: '07 political predictions Why did they do it? The year in crime Year in Video: The wild and the wacky See Year in Pictures (and cast your vote)   The wackiest video: 'Oddball' plays of '06 Take our 50-question 2006 news quiz 2006 Year in Review Section Front   Add 2006 Year in Review headlines to your news reader: