Implausible predictions

Inspired by New York Times columnist William Safire's wacky predictions for the new year, I submit the following list of my own, which may or may not be less plausible than Safire's.

I invite your own implausible predictions in the comments below.

1. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, describes another unnamed senior administration official as a "whiner who doesn't have the balls to go on record." A third senior administration official, speaking on condition of being referred to only as "a senior administration official, but not the one you're probably thinking of" was said to have further details about the dispute but could not share them at this time. A fifth senior administration official was unavailable for comment.

2. None of the 43 domestic house cats that attacked Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., tests positive for rabies — leaving doctors puzzled as to what caused the spontaneous, vicious attack by the otherwise docile animals. Frist is expected to make a full recovery, as is Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska. Young was severely injured earlier in the year when he was trampled by a herd of caribou.

3. Also expected to make a complete recovery is Vice President Dick Cheney, who collapsed at the start of a televised debate from what a spokesman later characterized as a "very, very, very minor heart attack." Debate moderator Brit Hume of Fox News accuses Cheney's opponent, Democratic vice presidential nominee Valerie Plame, of deliberately provoking the attack. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader criticizes the debate as "illegitimate" because his running mate, commentator and former speechwriter Pat Buchanan, is not invited to participate.

4. Tully Bascomb, Count of Mountjoy and prime minister of the alpine Duchy of Grand Fenwick, declares his intention to become "a very nasty dictator" and to pursue weapons of mass destruction. "I should think I'm rather a prime candidate for pre-emptive regime change," Bascomb wrote in a letter to U.S. president George W. Bush, offering to step down and end his "tyrannical rule" in exchange for $8.7 billion in American reconstruction funds. "A relative bargain," the count wrote. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the administration is split over the proper response, with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld advocating invasion and Secretary of State Colin Powell arguing that Grand Fenwick is merely a fictional country up to its old tricks.

5. Washington Times national editor Robert Stacy McCain shrugs off calls for him to step down after he admits to "inadvertently borrowing without extensive citation" several paragraphs in a recently published article. McCain characterized the incident as a "typographical error" and said charges of plagiarism were "overblown." The heirs of William Pierce, whose book The Turner Diaries was the source of the paragraphs in question, have said they are investigating possible civil action.

6. American Enterprise Institute resident scholar John R. Lott and his longtime friend and admirer Mary Rosh are married in what friends describe as a "quiet, if unconventional, ceremony."

7. A divided Supreme Court rules that the recently renamed "Life Spirit" detention camp in Guantanamo Bay is not on U.S. soil and therefore, "not subject to any earthly jurisdiction and certainly not to the establishment clause of the First Amendment." Charles Colson, whose Prison Fellowship organization began administering the camp in June, praises the decision as a vindication of Life Spirit's practice of "unforced, but very, very strongly encouraged conversion."

8. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay defends as "aggressively constitutional" his plans for an unprecedented third redistricting in his home state of Texas. "Constitution's where I got the idea for it," DeLay said, referring to his controversial proposal to reapportion the state's congressional map by counting "certain parties" as only three-fifths of a person.

9. The Diebold company again releases a statement reassuring the public that it's electronic voting machines are "100 percent secure." The statement is prompted when the surprise winner of the Democratic presidential primary in Maryland turns out to be a previously unknown write-in candidate named "SUPRPHREAKR373."

10. "Appalling," "grotesque" and "strangely compelling" are just some of the words used to describe the private sex video, widely circulated on the Internet, of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his wife, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell. The video confirms that Greenspan is a man of immense, er, influence on Wall Street, as financial analysts study the tape in minute detail, trying to discern from the randy Randian's every ecstatic grimace and moan the subtle signs that may indicate a coming shift in monetary policy. Investors, buoyed by the chairman's evident good health, help send the Dow back over 9,000.