My holiday wish list is not so cheerful this year. I cannot stop thinking about everything that has gone wrong in Washington. Sorry to be such a downer, but sometimes it seems like we have lost our minds in the nation’s capital.

The American people think less of Washington than usual. Most tell pollsters they have no confidence in Congress, the president, the Republican Party or the Democratic Party.

Who can blame them? These days Washington seems to shirk the people’s business for a parade of sideshows, from petty squabbles to low-rent corruption. A reporter spends three months in jail. A congressman admits to taking bribes. American soldiers fight and die in Iraq even as the politicians still argue about why we went in the first place. The city of New Orleans sinks in a hurricane and no one seems to have a clue about what to do about it.

Congress and President Bush cannot get a budget together, but they can find time to debate dumb stuff like naming the official holiday tree. Yes, Christmas itself has become a battleground in Washington’s world. We’re debating the “war on Christmas,” whatever that is. No wonder the American people think we’ve gone nuts.

Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly offered a curious twist on the Christmas spirit, telling his audience he would “use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people [who] diminish and denigrate” Christmas. He blamed “oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country” for the crime.

My first Christmas wish would be for an end to demonizing as a tactic in political debate. But with rabble rousers such as O’Reilly around to boil our blood, the hostilities keep escalating.

My second wish is that we pay more attention to Thomas H. Kean. The former Republican governor of New Jersey said it all upon release of the latest report by members of the Sept. 11 commission, which he chaired: “God help us if we have another attack.”

Read the seven-page report, which the 10 commissioners wrote a year after they were formally disbanded, and you can see why a calm and reasonable man such as Kean would sound so scared. The panel, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, basically concluded that the government is bungling the job of protecting and preparing the country. The report asserts that Washington is failing in even the most basic fundamentals, such as improving communication among emergency responders and distributing terrorism-fighting money according to where the threats are.

What’s worse, says Kean, is that the country as a whole is letting its guard down: “People are not paying attention.” He’s right. We’ve gone back to obsessing about goofy stuff instead of holding politicians accountable for protecting our lives.

My third holiday wish is for partisanship to again stop at the water’s edge so that we can get the troops home from Iraq. All the yelling and political positioning really doesn’t make sense if you consider how close the opposing sides really are. Most Republicans and Democrats want a phased pull-out. And, apparently, so does Bush, although he won’t come right out and say it.

Almost every day someone in the Bush administration, or a military official in Iraq, talks about plans to reduce troop levels. No one at the White House, including the president, seems to favor maintaining current levels.

But it doesn’t help the debate for the Bush team to use words like “cut and run” for those who are advocating a pull-out strategy that they themselves seem to be implementing. And the troops won’t get home any faster if the president’s foes keep calling him a liar for partly basing the invasion on a belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

The “liars” vs. “wimps” rhetoric of the Iraq debate obscures the narrowness of the space between the two sides. Their basic difference is that Bush will not agree to a specific timetable for troop reductions. Only an inconsequential minority of lawmakers advocate an immediate pull-out. And no one with credibility or authority on the president’s side is saying we should keep all 160,000 troops in Iraq much longer.

I wish the voters would take a little time out of their holiday fun and track down their senators and representatives as they mingle with constituents over the year-end break. Tell both sides to muzzle the partisan sniping and get to common ground on an Iraq policy that most Americans can understand and support.

None of our problems can be fixed if Washington cannot get its act together in 2006. That’s a big wish for an election year. The fight for Congress invites more, not less, partisanship and gridlock.

Still, I wish our leaders prove to be worthy of their power in the coming year, so that by next Christmas, we’ll all be in a better mood.

Contributing Editor Craig Crawford is a news analyst for MSNBC, CNBC and “The Early Show” on CBS. He can be reached at ccrawford@cq.com.