The end of the year traditionally begs for reflection. We do not defy Dick Clark.

Thankfully, we have shared an annus horribles so ridiculous and so rife in its breeding of gaffe that it seemed to move faster than a pseudoephedrine sale across the street from a trailer park.

In the wake of a year which has revealed so much about the ghosts of of those we readily hoist up on our shoulders, highlights of the failings of the celebrity humanitarian machine pile up high enough to sate even the recreational habits of Ted Haggard.

Brad Pitt nobly declared in an interview that he and √É.√ºber-mistress Jolie would not indulge in marriage until all who wish to do so are legally able. Chivalry is dead, Brad, so maybe you could refrain from eating until the world’s hunger is satisfied, or perhaps you would consider stopping making movies until … no, just stop making movies.

And when the least offensive character in television history springs a cog and sets back civil rights a good hundred years in a single stand-up routine, you know things have really entered the fray — no word yet on the green light for the Cosmo Kramer spin-off series.

Lest we not neglect Our Savior of Batshit, goy of goys Mel Gibson, who with the help of a little social lubricant (Mexican tequila, only the best for the pious) marked anti-Semitism’s comeback as a four-letter word. More scandalous than a Marv Albert press conference and with a better hair stylist, Australia’s resident shame-machine felt it prudent to pave his road to retribution with an only moderately controversial holiday film starring 1,000 unpaid aborigines and a defunct native language.

Also of note, apologies lose a certain air of sincerity when they require separate takes. And when they involve the words “sugar tits.”

Throw him up with the unsettling majority of our glorious nation that figured a second term in the White House couldn’t make things much worse: these are the same people who think you can get pregnant by kissing. Red states be damned.

Short of producing a Disney-backed miniseries about the Holocaust, there isn’t much more Gibson can do to ensure his place at the annual Yentl marathon and kugel fest. Oh wait, he did want to do that. Never mind.

Equally amusing was the public flogging of New York Times Bestselling author and Oprah devotee James Frey, whose exaggerated memoir was ousted as more fiction than non, and who was promptly recalled to the House of O where he received the wet noodle from his visibly embarrassed patron.

Yes, we all get it, Frey confused the definitions of real and make-believe and he wrote a good book out of the deal. He bent over and took Oprah’s backhand on national television and yet the true irony has still to be realized. Yet has “Orpah” — which is her biblically eponymous birth name. Who’s the liar now? — been sanctified as Pontiff? Last time I checked, daytime television had yet to be recognized as the preferred moral compass of God-fearing literati. God forbid anybody read a book around here.

In between a “Hollywood Sqaures” — worthy load of mea culpas and media backlash, some important things did, in fact, happen. For example, Tom Cruise had his alien baby, the genocide in Darfur claimed nearly half a million lives and a new season of “The Real World” premiered.

In a year saturated with such collective ignominy and perpetual apologia, never has counting down a giant crystal ball seemed a more appropriate nostrum to the tired recycled failings of personal integrity. That and Dick Clark.