William Safire passed away this year and with him the hope for another slew of his year-end prognostications. As an insider’s insider he would frequently predict Israeli-Arab detente, Henry Kissinger’s return to the State Department and Richard Nixon’s final vindication. Of course, since much of his insider’s knowledge came straight from Nixon and Kissinger it wasn’t too hard to predict Safire’s success rate. (About the same as Nixon’s second term.)

Into this vacuum someone needs to step. Someone who is a complete outsider, who cannot help but see the future as distorted by an optimistic heart. That’d be me. So here’s what I see, clear as daylight, for the first year of this new decade.

The Supreme Court: Justice Antonin Scalia is showing signs of serious judicial burnout — ever more sarcastic and intemperate. He’s not enjoying the court and the prospect of having to outlast Obama’s second term, which will end in January of 2017 when Antonin will be 81, grates on him. He’ll be thinking of resigning all this summer, and when the court returns in the fall, he’ll announce. Two weeks later, Justice Clarence Thomas will also resign and the two will make public their plans for a joint memoir and tour via Thomas’s motor home, both to be named, “None of your damn business.”

The Senate: Talk of changing the filibuster rules will soon be forgotten and the Senate will settle into an angry mood. The Republicans will slowly come to understand that their solid opposition to health care reform has only enriched their legacy of opposition to Social Security, Civil Rights, and Medicare, each of which has required an entire generation to forget the Republican role. Predictions of Republican victories in the fall will be additionally undercut by the Tea Baggers’ continued purge of the moderates. The opportunity for comedy will continue unabated as new mirthmakers join Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, and the ever-sidesplitting Mitch McConnell. They don’t call him the Senate Wit for nothing.

The House of Representatives: The fall elections will have only a mild impact in the House, due to the effect of the Tea Baggers driving Republican candidates to the extreme right, and the Democrats eventually learning how to explain the success of health care reform. The Democrats will lose less than ten seats, some of which will be switcheroos of Blue Dogs coming out of the political closet as Republicans. Nancy Pelosi will finally learn to smile as if it doesn’t hurt.

The War in Afghanistan: Two things need to happen or the war is toast: First, the Pakistani leadership and the Pakistani people need to start loving us or the Taliban will continue to have a safe haven there, so dangerously near their Dr. Atomic Kahn. A new George Kennan-like containment policy will arise because that is the best we can hope for.

Afghan War Part II: Karzai needs to go. Since he can be bought out of his presidency, somewhere around March he’s going to be feeling the urge to retire to San Francisco, where he’ll join his family developing of a new chain of restaurants which may or may not be fronts for drug laundering. If the name of the chain turns out to be “Poppy’s,” consider it a clue.

The Commentariat of the New York Times: Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd will write frequently annoying and inane columns that will have intelligent women everywhere complaining that they could do better. Those intelligent women will be correct.

Tom Friedman will realize that he’s losing his success rate to the average stopped clock and retire to focus on writing non-political travel books. They will be very short. But somehow still turgid.

Paul Krugman will remain correct, but regretfully so, almost all the time. He will learn rigorous new writing discipline, and use the interjection, “But wait” only every other column.

Frank Rich will maintain his weekly backwards gaze, reviewing the political theatre of What Just Happened. He will not look forward, since you can’t review something that hasn’t yet taken place.

Ross Douthat, the latest and most confusing of the Time’s attempts to find a conservative voice who can speak without generating those annoying little flecks of foam that form at the corners of the mouth, will resign from the paper and begin his studies for the priesthood by joining Opus Dei.

Bob Herbert and Nick Kristof will regularly make us feel angry, guilty and bad. Thanks I guess.

David Brooks will continue his complex and highly public metamorphosis from an acolyte of William F. Buckley, Jr, into some new kind of political exotic that will combine a basic and caring liberal decency tempered by skepticism of big government in general and disoriented by an irrational fear of transitory deficits. A single lunch with Paul Krugman should be helpful, in which case the transition from genuine conservative to genuine liberal will be complete.

And those folks over at the White House? The President and his team will refine their new kind of executive branch: policy over politics, deep cool, and long-term thinking. Those in the chattering classes who can only understand what’s going on by noticing what moved in the previous 24 hour news cycle will persist in missing the unfolding tectonics of the new era.

What do you see? I can’t wait to hear what you think will (or ought) to happen in the coming year.

Frank Rich gets it right more often than not, and his column in the Times last Sunday swept the entire decade into a neat little dustpan and dumped it in the garbage. His insight is that Tiger Woods is truly the person of the decade, a fraud capping a decade of frauds that started with Enron, wound its way through a phony war, went broke with phony financiers, and concluded with a phony hero. Fortunately Rich ended with a spiritual and uplifting finale that, at least for me, had me singing on the way out of the theatre.

Actually, in the spirit of Rich’s phony decade, I lied about that last part. There was no happy conclusion to his piece. But it caused me to keep wondering — why are we so untethered? What happened to the basic judgment of a previously sensible people?

Authors swim in the memes of the times. If there are strong currents, we go with them and occasionally bring understanding to the great issues of the day. But when we are surrounded by eddy currents, we too find ourselves stuck in little currents, unable to find the great tide that, as Shakespeare said, “When taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Before the era when the New York Times was distributed to its printers around the country electronically, all of the papers were printed in and around Manhattan. On any Sunday, airplanes would leave New York, weather permitting, and the massive bundles would spread out across the country, bringing a measure of coherency to many of the major memes that flowed through the culture. At the very least, the Times provided a sensible, apparently complete view of what had happened in the past week. And it also provided an agenda for the near future.

Later, the roll-out of the Sunday Times became almost simultaneous and national. On the West Coast, that meant our Sundays could start earlier. We were even more in sync with New York. That phase has mysteriously eroded away with the onset of the Internet. That steady weekly pulse of the Sunday Times has given way to a continuous flow of information from an infinite number of sources. The Times as authority has been drowned out. No institution has taken its place.

We find ourselves in a new Wild Wild West, and, as predicted, the snake oil salesmen are having a grand time of it –those rubes will believe anything and buy anything. We might take some comfort in remembering what came next: newspapers arrived in those frontier towns, courageous reporters, editors and publishers began to shine a light on the forces of corruption and to rally public opinion on the side of good (sometimes.) The towns eventually hired sheriffs, and built jails. Judges rode the circuit and dispensed justice.

Fortunately, order will prevail over the current chaos. Visionary and courageous publishers in all media will invest mightily to make the most of the new opportunities. A New New York Times, either on the ashes of the old or a new enterprise altogether, will arise. Out of the sheer force of brilliant and persistent reporting, deep commentary, and visionary leadership, the nation will find its way once again. Memes will cohere, and authenticity will once again be the currency of the culture. That’s the way it’s going to be. Really. Trust me.

A Merry Christmas to all those celebrating, and Happy Holidays to all!

I had abandoned my plans to buy Sarah Palin’s autobiography. You know how it is — you hear about what is likely to be a great book and you get all ready to read it, but you don’t quite pay attention to what day it’s going to come out, and then all those critics get an early copy and before long everybody is already telling you about all the great stuff that’s in the book and if you don’t put your fingers in your ears and go la la la it’s all spoiled.

Sometimes I wish everyone could just keep it to themselves for a week and give the rest of us a chance to experience something like this without having others make up our minds for us. But then, the author Herself went on tour and suddenly she was everywhere talking about her book and answering questions. So here we are a week or so later, and I just can’t imagine anything older than Going Rogue.

So even though I’d taken it off my must have list, I was in a Costco over the weekend and there was a pile of several hundred of her books, all red and exciting on the end of a huge table. I have to admit, Frank Rich’s insights notwithstanding, I was still drawn to pick one up. Maybe there was something about Ms. Palin that everyone had missed. Maybe the secret of her attraction would finally, suddenly, become dazzlingly clear to me.

I picked up a copy of the book and fanned it open to read a sample. Surely this was going to be as close as Sarah Palin and I were ever going to get in this life, so no question there was a little frisson in the air. I’m not kidding. Right there in the middle of Costco. Powerful something going on.

I looked at the page. I don’t remember now exactly which one, but I was immediately struck by something peculiar. It just didn’t look like a normal page in a book. Was it the typography? There were all these little verticals dancing all over the place. What the heck was going on? Was it the weird Costco lighting? Was I becoming dyslexic? Oh dog, please tell me it wasn’t happening!

But then I saw what it was. The page was full of a great many freestanding uppercase ‘I’s. It was the most I have ever seen on a page. Fortunately, my wife has a peculiar genius for pattern recognition. I got her attention by showing her what I was reading. She gave me a look that said, “Are you okay?” But she came over and peered at the page I was pointing to. “See anything strange here?” In less than two seconds she saw it too. “‘I’s all over the place. I’ve never seen so many.”

We counted them. Twenty-seven ‘I’s on a single page. Just for a reality check, I searched around for a comparable autobiography, and Ted Kennedy’s True Compass fell conveniently to hand. We opened to a random page and counted the ‘I’s. Four. We tried another page. Twelve. Clearly the man cared too little about his subject. An ego piker, no question.

I felt Palin deserved an award of some kind for her achievement. I’ll bet Sigmund Freud’s best pals didn’t run around Vienna calling him Siggy. Just didn’t have the right sound. I’ll bet they called him Ziggy. And that’s the perfect name for the Best Achievement in Ego for 2009. Sarah Palin, your Ziggy is in the mail. Bigger than an Oscar and much, much brighter.

Fortunately, I turned to another page and found a little morsel from Sarah that was fresh for me, and I’d like to share it. She seems obsessed with killing and eating animals, and she’s been oft quoted to the effect that she has a place for all of Alaska’s endangered species. That’d be on her plate, right next to the mashed potatoes. Hilarious. But I found an even better quote from her: “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” Sounds like something out of Jeffrey Dahmer’s playbook, actually. And if you’re Sarah’s dog or cat or chubby little baby, downright terrifying.