Any summary of all the year-end assessments of 2008 would be incomplete without taking note of Rich Lowry's column on the years of American history that were worse. He lists 1798, 1837, 1862, 1940 and 1968 as bigger bummers. And that's coming from a conservative who undoubtedly considers the electoral results of 2008 a large calamity.

This silver-lining column did not represent a unanimous conservative judgment, of course. At Lowry's National Review site, Victor Davis Hanson called 2008 "the Roaring 20s, the bleak 1930s, and the Sixties — all rolled into one," and worse yet, as a time when "50 years’ worth of careful thinking and hard-won wisdom were erased, as the Reagan Revolution, the work of Milton Freidman, and the classical free-market ethos were suddenly Trotskyized."

Now that's a silver lining any progressive can appreciate.