In 2006, it was difficult to tell the tragedy from the farce.

President Bush, who has a reputation for honesty and forthrightness, assured the American public on the 1st of November that Donald Rumsfeld would be secretary of Defense until the end of his term. Seven days later, Bush fired Rumsfeld, replacing him with Robert Gates. The administration has long maintained that the CIA is a broken, dysfunctional bureaucracy in need of change. Gates began his professional career as an analyst for the CIA and eventually ascended to the position of director, helping to make the agency what it is today.

The wise souls on the New Jersey Supreme Court acknowledged that neither the state's marriage statutes nor its constitution provide for the right of marriage to be extended to same-sex couples. The justices further found that the democratically enacted Domestic Partnership Act of 2004 explicitly acknowledges that same-sex couples cannot marry. After issuing said pronouncements, the court ruled in favor of gay marriage, saying that these niggling bits of law were trumped by a "developing understanding" in the world about the goodness of same-sex unions.

Democrats won an election, finally. Across the country, Democratic congressional candidates ran hard against the Iraq war, despite the fact that Congress has little influence on its conduct or course. After the election, no prominent Republicans threatened to move abroad. Neither did Republicans blame the loss on Diebold voting machines, voter intimidation, or the stupidity of the electorate. Not that conservatives were without their analytical crutches. On the morning after the election, radio host Hugh Hewitt wrote that Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) was the cause of the Republican defeat.

The complexities of Islam continued to puzzle the West. A newspaper in Denmark made headlines for publishing cartoons depicting images of Muhammad. Some of these drawings suggested that there was a casual, if not causal, link between Islam and violence. Muslims around the world rioted in protest, killing dozens of people. Amid the riots, a Catholic priest was murdered by a Muslim assassin in Turkey. A few months later, two Muslim students at an Islamic school in Melbourne urinated on a Bible, spit on it, and then burned it. No Christians, anywhere, rioted, protested, or even bothered to organize a stray boycott. The Associated Press reported that "residents of a southern Somalia town who do not pray five times a day will be beheaded" as part of a regime of Islamic religious law being instituted there.

Andrew Sullivan, who was editor of the New Republic before he ascended to the position of blogger, coined the term Christianist as a way of comparing Islamist radicals with Christians who disagree about the "developing understanding" on gay marriage.

Meanwhile, Muslim taxi drivers came into conflict with two pillars of Western civilization: disability rights and booze. In British Columbia, Behzad Saidy, a taxi driver who is Muslim, refused to pick up Bruce Gilmour, who is blind. The sticking point was Gilmour's guide dog, which Saidy declared was against his religion to transport. At the Minneapolis airport, Muslim cab drivers refused to drive passengers carrying bottles of liquor or wine - or, for that matter, people who wanted rides to bars. In light of the Minnesota Twins' playoff collapse, this proved deeply unfair to the local citizenry.

Tom Cruise became the first silver-screen leading man in a generation to self-destruct on public. Sages could not agree which was more damaging to his image: the "silent birth" of his child; his dismissal by Sumner Redstone, chief honcho at Viacom, the parent company of Paramount, who ended Paramount's deal with Cruise's production company; or the discovery that he wore a girdle under his tuxedo at his celebrity all-star wedding. Cruise and bride Katie Holmes declined even to wave to the locals of Bracciano, Italy, who patiently hosted the circus.

Lindsay Lohan, philosopher, completed a final, unimpeachable proof of the Slippery Slope Theorem. For several years, the "accidental" nipple slip has been a staple of the celebrity-fashion industrial complex. With the bourgeoisie no longer so easily épater-ed, Lohan upped the stakes, beginning the trend of the "accidental" nether-slip.

President Bush made a trip to King County, Wash., in June to raise money for local Republicans, including congressman Dave Reichert. A school bus driver made an inappropriate gesture to the presidential motorcade as it passed by. The president - who once called a reporter a "major-league [expletive]" over an open microphone - noticed the gesture and remarked on it to Reichert. Reichert called the school district. The bus driver was fired.

It was that kind of year.

Contact Jonathan V. Last at jlast@phillynews.com

This piece originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.