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We've come a long way in this country since the 19th century -- but not so long that an admirer of the Confederacy can't be nominated to run the Justice Department of the United States. The president of the Confederate government, Jefferson Davis, is a hero to Sen. John Ashcroft, the man selected to become the next attorney general.

Ashcroft told the Southern Partisan quarterly in a 1998 interview: "Your magazine also helps set the record straight. You've got a heritage of doing that, of defending Southern patriots like [Robert E.] Lee, [Stonewall] Jackson and Davis. Traditionalists must do more. I've got to do more. We've all got to stand up and speak in this respect, or else we'll be taught that these people were giving their lives, subscribing their sacred fortunes and their honor to some perverted agenda."

Evidently, Ashcroft can't abide the idea that preservation of slavery was a "perverted agenda."

MARATHON, Texas -- So far out in West Texas, there's only God and country on the radio. Along with endless sky and no cellphones. Drive across the Rio Grande in your pickup for lunch and say, "Oh, good, the War on Drugs is bound to work eventually, because there's only 27 trucks waiting on the other side."

In the odd way that the detachment of distant places seems to reinforce reality, it becomes ever clearer that the Republicans in Washington are in an impossible bind.

President-elect George W. Bush seems to have made the odd choice of governing as if he had a mandate in a country where the hot new bumper sticker is "Re-elect Gore." One watches the Republicans in the Senate seal their own doom -- no power sharing, no committee chairmanships. And what do they think the Democrats are going to do when the D's take power?

It's like writing election law -- if you try to bend it in your favor one time, it will come around and bite you on the behind the next.

Let's finger some false prophets who often escape public ridicule because enough time has elapsed since they made their foolish predictions.

Here's that salesman of the virtues, Bill Bennett, who once co-chaired the Council on Crime in America, and issued a 1996 report titled "The State of Violent Crime in America," containing these ominous words and (entirely inaccurate) predictions: "America is a ticking violent crime bomb. Rates of violent juvenile crime and weapons offenses have been increasing dramatically, and by the year 2000, could spiral out of control."

These were the years when headline-seeking criminologists like John DiIulio of Princeton and Northeastern's James Alan Fox painted lurid scenarios of "superpredators," meaning urban youth of color, swelling Generation Y by as much as 24 percent.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The time has come to bid farewell to President William Jefferson Clinton. Been a lot of wasted time and wasted talent these eight years. The politics of personal destruction. A level of vituperation so intense and so stupid that it shut down the federal government twice.

And through it all came the Unsinkable Clinton, ever bobbing up again cheerfully in a fashion that maddened his enemies.

Years ago, an Arkansas senator told me that Clinton's greatest strength is that he's like one of those round-bottomed children's toys -- you tump him over and he pops back up, you tump him over again and he pops back up again. As near as I can tell after eight years, the man gets up every single day in a state of cheerful anticipation, ready to set about whatever's on the plate.

We have never once seen him in a temper or a sulk or being vindictive or holding a grudge. Closest we ever saw to an upset Bill Clinton was right after we had watched him discussing the most intimate details of his private life for four hours on national television, and to this good day I have no idea what public purpose was served by that exercise in humiliation.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Traditionally, when one bids adieu to the year just past, a tone of cynical good-riddance to 12 sorry months is da rigor, as they say in Lubbock.

Well, forget tradition. I say 2000 was a glorious political year from start to finish and can think of few years more packed with delight than the one we have just skinned through. Here's to Y2K, arguably the beginning of the new millennium and inarguably a mighty fine start on something, whatever it was.

Here's to the National Egg On Your Face, How Wrong Can You Be, How Many Times Can You Be That Wrong, Let's Go On Television and Make Fools of Ourselves Year-Long Pundit Pratfall!

From Who's-John-McCain to who won Florida, the most striking feature of the political year was the evitability of George W. Bush.

All the king's horses, all the king's men and all the Republican money in the country could barely drag the poor guy across the finish line. Special thanks to Jeff Greenfield of CNN for having the common sense to observe at several points, "None of us has any idea what's going to happen now."

AUSTIN, Texas -- Goodness, someone has left some nasty little lumps of coal in our stockings. Fortunately, someone else put in a few nice, shiny toys.

Look at this lousy lump. Just before it left town last week, Congress passed a little horror called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, brought to us courtesy of heavy lobbying by Wall Street banks and investment brokers.

Frank Portnoy, writing in The New York Times, describes the bill thusly: "First, it lifts a long-standing ban on futures trading in individual stocks, thus allowing investors to buy shares through brokers with very little money down. Second, it protects a lucrative business for bankers -- the private financial contracts known as swaps -- from being regulated. ... Investors are affected by swaps because they are ... used by many mutual funds and publicly traded companies."

Thinking of sending an end-of-year contribution to a public interest outfit, perhaps one of the big green groups? Why not pass up the outfits with big staffs and excessive overhead in favor of less well known, but nonetheless lean and hardy battlers for the public good. I offer you five. These are tax exempts, but check with them to make sure.

The conquest of the American West started with the extermination of the buffalo. That slaughter continues, as the Department of Interior and Montana Department of Livestock pursue its policy of capturing and killing all buffalo that leave the boundary of Yellowstone National Park, supposedly to keep the animals from spreading brucellosis to cattle. During winter the buffalo often migrate down out of the deep snows of Yellowstone onto national forest lands in search of forage. When they do, they enter a free-fire zone. The science is fuzzy, but that hasn't slowed the slaughter. The Buffalo Field Campaign has.

As usual, the competition for P.U.-litzers has been fierce.

For the ninth year in a row, I have worked with Jeff Cohen of the media watch group FAIR to sift through the many entries for the annual award that pays tribute to this nation's stinkiest media performances.

And now, the P.U.-litzer Prizes for 2000:

* SWALLOW THE MONEY PRIZE -- Barbara Walters and ABC

The panel on "The View" program broke into a chorus of the "M'm M'm good" jingle when Walters asked, "Didn't we grow up eating Campbell's soup?" It was all according to plan. In November, blurring the line between programming and advertising, parts of eight episodes of ABC's daytime chat show became paid infomercials for Campbell's. As the Wall Street Journal reported, Walters and her panel agreed to "try to weave a soup message into their regular on-air banter." An ABC News executive defended the hucksterism of Walters, a news personality, by saying that "The View" is an entertainment show and that "people wear many hats."

* COOL YOUR JETS AWARD -- New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post

AUSTIN, Texas -- Procrastinators of the world, unite! Be it resolved that we will be found from now until quite late on Christmas Eve solving all our Christmas shopping problems at the best one-stop shop in town, the bookstore -- preferably a local bookstore.

I firmly believe it is well worth going out of one's way to shop at an independent bookstore. The importance of independent bookstores to a healthy culture is not to be overestimated, but if an independent is not available, all the chains now have fancy coffee.

Then, of course, for the eternal procrastinator comes the problem of having bought a book for a loved one in Alaska two days before Christmas. You can always take them and dump them at one of those places that specializes in shipping things -- this costs only a small fortune -- but I believe the better part of valor is to carefully train your loved ones never to expect anything before Valentine's Day. This adds a piquant element of surprise to their dull February days.

Can you imagine if it was the other way round, and it was Bush who'd won the popular vote but lost the electoral college after a U.S. Supreme Court dominated by Democratic appointees had voted 5-4 to stop counting votes likely to assure a Republican victory in, let us say, Illinois? We think we can safely guarantee that the Republicans would not be taking the soft path of "coming together" and reconciliation. They would be screaming about stolen elections, constitutional illegitimacy, and pledging to resist the "coup" by any means necessary. By now we would have had the Republicans in both House and Senate vowing to boycott the Inauguration. Unlike the Democrats, Republicans take losing and winning seriously.

You can tell the Republicans know this is going to look bad in the history books. Why else have they floated the notion that it might be wise, in the interests of civic tranquillity, to put all of Florida's ballots under lock and key for all eternity? It seems that Christie Todd Whitman, the governor of New Jersey, first put the idea up on MSNBC, claiming that a recount of the sort promised by the Miami Herald would somehow delegitimize the Bush presidency.