After two decades as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan finally donned the cardigan sweater of retirement. Say what you will about the housing bubble, record deficits and the banking system’s time bomb of derivative securities, the man kept a cast iron lid on inflation. Which is important because prices shouldn’t go up simply because you’ve had another birthday. And yet they do. A lousy relief pitcher today pulls down more in a single season than Babe Ruth earned in his entire career. So it’s no surprise that 2005 ushered in the largest corporate profit in American history. Thanks to Dick Cheney’s energy policy, Exxon recorded earnings of $36 billion. Yet it cost ten times that amount to invade Iraq and jack up the price of gasoline. It would have been vastly cheaper for the government to cut a check to the petroleum industry and skip the war altogether. Perhaps then Delta and Northwest Airlines wouldn’t be in bankruptcy and all those Ford and GM workers could keep their jobs.

His weekly allowance from the Carlyle Group notwithstanding, the economic impact of soaring energy prices is not lost on the President. During his State of the Union address, he went so far as to accuse America of being “addicted to oil.” An audacious move given our dealer was sitting right behind him. Nonetheless, Mr. Bush went on to boast that he had “spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, more reliable alternative energy sources.” And though he made no mention of the $8.5 billion misplaced by the Coalition Provisional Authority, he announced “a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy.” The President lectured that we must “change how we power our automobiles” and embrace “cutting-edge methods of producing [energy] from wood chips, stalks or switch grass.” W. then asked for legislation to force car manufacturers to adopt this newfangled technology otherwise known as “the steam engine.”

The President also argued that our role as OPEC’s supplicant is “allowing radical Islam to work its will.” His solution is to foment “democratic reform across the broader Middle East.” Free elections, however, cannot guarantee friendly regimes. Witness Iran and Palestine. In fact, Bush’s truculent foreign policy (to “act boldly in freedom’s cause”) is rarely successful; more often than not it backfires. Since 2001, even South America has demonstratively turned away from us, with voters ensconcing socialist regimes in Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Venezuela.

White House speechwriters also ladled in a heavy portion of kids-are-our-future sentimentality. To that effect, Mr. Bush noted that in spite of No Child Left Behind, we rank 19th globally in primary education and are falling precipitously. Given that the rest of the world speaks English better than we do, it is best, he opined, to concentrate on our numbers. As such he wants to “train 70,000 high school teachers, to lead advanced-placement courses in math and science … and bring 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in classrooms.” This from the guy who wants to replace the theory of evolution with Biblical innuendo and who threatened NASA’s chief climate scientist James Hansen with “dire consequences” after Hansen went public with irrefutable evidence of global warming. Other ironies: The President called on Congress to renew the Patriot Act despite his assertion that he is anyways above the law, and suggested granting permanence to deficit-engendering tax cuts will somehow lead us towards solvency. His coup de grâce came when he brazenly chastised the nuclear-enamored leaders of “Iran, a nation now held hostage by [this] small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people,” when right here, right here in America… well, you know the rest.

It is said that God has a sense of humor (note to European publishers: send memo to Muslims), yet it is far more poignant than droll that Corretta Scott King died the very moment Samuel Alito was sworn in as a Justice of the Supreme Court. I mean, who wants to sit around and watch four decades of social progress dismantled brick by brick? Certainly not Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who succumbed to cancer rather than face the death of American feminism.

As a result of Affirmative Action and Title IX legislation, women are now running Fortune 500 companies; they are judges, Senators, even child molesters.  Do we want to once again gender restrict these domains?  What future awaits the scores of female teachers (e.g. Mary Kay Letourneau, Nicole Long, etc.) arrested for having sex with underage students?  What opportunities will Alito’s world provide for Jennifer San Marcos who, impelled by the new 39¢ stamp, proved men aren’t the only ex-employees who can gun down a bunch of people in a post office?  Why women have made such great strides that Laura Bush predicted a female President is not far in the offing: “I think it will happen, for sure. I think it will happen probably in the next few terms of the presidency in the United States.”  Yes, women have taken the helm in Germany, Chile and Liberia, but we need one here, and soon.  All this war-mongering Testosterone is pushing us to the brink of extinction.

This battle of the sexes is even playing out on TV, where Geena Davis serves as Commander in Chief. Okay, okay; Geena’s chromosomes are, admittedly, questionable, but why split hairs? With the specter of the WB/UPN merger and Amy Fisher/Buttafuoco reunion hanging over the industry, ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff had to get blown up in Iraq to garner solid ratings. Oprah, by way of contrast, merely had to sit on a couch and host a book club. She deftly made a mini-series out of James Frey’s runaway bestseller, “A Million Little Pieces.” Weeks after she initially publicized the memoir, she defended it when its authenticity came under fire (“it still resonates”). When her cadre of mop-squeezers finally turned sour, she devoted an hour long broadcast to publicly scolding its author. Reluctantly, Mr. Frey admitted that that he had NOT, while in rehab, cloned a dog and engineered 11 lines of patient-specific, genetically customized stem cells. If this saga had instead unfolded in the papers, the headline might have read: “Nation Duped by Lying ex-Addict.” Now where have I seen that before?