Things Can Only Get Better

This started out as such a nice year. My first story back in January was a little scoop; 77-year-old John Glenn was going back into space.

It seemed unbelievable until what came after.

In a matter of days we were pondering how a grown man being sued for sexual harassment could possibly get himself entangled with a 21-year-old intern. The man turned out to be the president.

It was just as weird on Capitol Hill. A Republican cabal wanted a coup against House Speaker Gingrich but they couldn't agree on a successor when they discovered they disliked each other more than they disliked Gingrich.

They called it all over. They got it later, of course, and in the latest turn of all, the fellow who succeeded Gingrich also resigned.

It was a year when journalists grappled with the Starr report, our first X-rated government document, and two capitol policemen were shot dead by a tourist.

Congress accomplished virtually nothing but found a way to impeach the president on a party-line vote.

Weirder still, after the vote the Democrats who had favored censuring the president by asking him to sign a document admitting he had dishonored the office joined him at the office for a pep rally.

It left us with a Democratic Party that was headed by an impeached president and a Republican Party that was just headless.

But hey, the stock market ignored the whole thing. John Glenn got home safely. And there's another ray of hope: after a year this awful, next year is bound to be better.

Happy New Year.

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