I LEARNED FROM queer activist Robert Haaland's blog (www.leftinsf.com) the other day that the Pentagon had decided a same-sex kiss-in at UC Santa Cruz was a "credible threat of terrorism" and thus had to be secretly monitored. That information, according to the Service Members Legal Defense Network, came several months after news broke that the Pentagon, in 1994, had tried to develop a chemical weapon that would turn enemy troops into homosexuals.

This is actually true.

It's been a very, very strange year.

It's a good thing I keep files all year long on material that might make it into the annual Off Guard Awards, because when you go back and look at this stuff, it's hard to believe it really happened. Did the president of the United States really say that God had put him in office to deal with the terrorists? Did Sen. Rick Santorum really argue that people who didn't leave New Orleans in time to avoid the flood should be penalized? Did the 49ers and the cops really make those videos? Did Aaron Peskin really vote for Home Depot?

Yeah, they did.

Esquire magazine, as part of its Dubious Achievement Awards, once asked: "Could this be the worst year ever?" I think that was 1986 or something, but I'm tempted to steal the line every single year. You wonder how much worse it can get; as the late, great Hunter S. Thompson would say, it's tempting to file 2005 under TTF, for Try to Forget.

And yet there was good news in the past 12 months, and it starts with the fact that, for once, it appears George W. Bush isn't getting away with blaming every problem in the known universe on "the terrorists." The tides turn quickly in this age of instant media, and the news that the government was secretly spying on US citizens seemed to go off like a percussion bomb in the political landscape. By late December even some fairly mainstream members of Congress were using the word "impeachment" – and on Dec. 23, a very unscientific MSNBC poll found that 85 percent of the respondents thought Bush had committed impeachable offenses.

And certainly by modern standards, he has: If a clandestine blow job gets you tried in the Senate, a clandestine spying program and a clandestine plan to go to war on the basis of lies clear the bar.

On to 2006.

Tim Redmond