Nancy with the pretty face: Speaker Pelosi and other characters of the moment.(CULTURE WATCH II)(Nancy Pelosi)

'I'M looking forward to moving forward" sounds just like George W. Bush but it's a safe bet that Election 2006 cured him of this particular locution. His days of looking forward are so manifestly behind him that we can only hope that he doesn't spend the next two years revisiting his days of wine and Four Roses.

The glitzy cable coverage of Election Night made me look backward to a time when spats-wearing clerks on ladders chalked in returns on a giant blackboard set up in the ballroom of one of those grand old hotels with marble floors and gilded acanthus leaves that were said to have something called "character." This year's news studios looked like nightclubs--not just any nightclub, either, but the one designed by Salvador Dali for the dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound.

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The graphics achieved chaos of such Biblical proportions that it was hard to tell a pot of message from a mess of pottage. The most puzzling was CNN's gas-tank gauge with a needle set to swing to Empty for behind and Full for ahead; or maybe it was supposed to be a speedometer to measure how fast the vote count was going. Another channel cluttered up the screen with a stack of ascending blocks representing vote percentages that looked like the print-check icon on a fax machine that shows you how much ink is left in your cartridge. Both distractions disappeared sometime during the evening, but they provided a weary reminder of that American specialty: the improvement that only makes things worse, like software upgrades or those redesigned containers that say "Tear Here" but never do.

But the really alarming aspect of the 2006 coverage was the strange new fairness doctrine spreading through the ranks of the talking heads, a speech habit of the sort heretofore associated with obsessive-compulsives who use words as charms to ward off bad luck and curses. Led by Chris Matthews, they have begun to pronounce "Missouri" in two different ways in the same sentence: Missouree and Missouruh. Matthews has been bothered by this for months; once, on Hardball, he began speculating aloud, as though talking to himself, that it was pronounced one way by natives, or maybe Midwesterners in general, and another way by everyone else. Finally, he began to take turns, and other heads followed suit. Some may think it's a problem for Henry Higgins, but I say it's a problem for Sigmund Freud. Our pursuit of equality has done its work; now, everybody is right and nobody is wrong and our speech must reflect the alternate reality we have created. Political correctness is steadily yielding to total babbling incoherence, which is why the redesigned and upgraded American eagle is clutching electroshock cables in one claw and straitjacket ties in the other.

You are probably on your bed of pain right about now, but the election results contain hidden conservative benefits if only we look for them. I am not referring to the civics-class rationalizations, such as the inherent safety of checks and balances, that have already taken on a hollow ring. I'm talking psychological warfare big time.

In a word, give thanks for Nancy Pelosi. Never mind her politics, just look at her and what do you see? A woman of 66 who has had five children yet looks 46, with a beautiful figure and a face as pretty as the proverbial picture. Think of it: not glamorous, not sexy, but pretty. When was the last time you heard a woman called that? Today's idea of a compliment is "hot." You can't have too many anachronisms and the word pretty is the most anachronistic of them all. Now listen to her and what do you hear? A voice that is "soft, gentle, and low--an excellent thing in woman," as King Lear said.