Beginnings - NYTimes.com A day in a fresh year that begins with a sunrise view of Mount Rainier and ends with a sunset at Key West forces inevitable questions about the implausibility of this oversize nation. Is it crazy to think that a few broad ideas still hold together a land of earnest strivers represented by a Congress of window breakers? The view from one Washington, with its self-inflicted and phony political crises, offers no hope. Let's start 2013 by stating the obvious and repeat until fixed: the Republican House of Representatives is beyond broken, stuffed with politicians who lack the ability to divide up juice boxes in a kindergarten. Three-fourths of Americans think they are harming the rest of us. "Dereliction of duty" was Gov. Chris Christie's apt phrase, referring to the failure to vote on promised aid for hurricane relief. Lucky for us that the rest of the country, even in a slide of doubt, is full of people who believe that we still have something in our shared opportunity commensurate with our capacity to wonder, to borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the season of starts and deep sleeps, the darkest, coldest time of the calendar, it's always worthwhile to force a wish list of better tomorrows. So, to beginnings: A new Congress, sworn in Thursday, will be less crazy than the old one by only a few degrees of wacko. Gone, at least, are a deadbeat dad and a longtime politician who said his official statements were not intended to be factual. Let the new gang resolve to live by a political version of the Hippocratic oath, and do no (further) harm. O.K., that's never going to happen, not as long as we send people to Washington from gerrymandered districts of voters who share the same biases. I'll try again: the only job of Congress is to govern. That may be impossible, given that the House hooligans have planted fresh land mines designed to blow us all up in a few months. See debt ceiling, the explosive of choice. The fault is entirely with a knot of Tea Party extremists who will never consider a fresh idea and a House Speaker whose notion of compromise is to tell his Democratic counterpart in the Senate to commit an unprintable act. For John Boehner, his profane shout-out to Harry Reid passed for a New Year's toast. The president can show muscle and courage and look to the long view. He answers now only to history, in one sense, and doesn't need to grandstand or gloat at finally raising taxes. This gifted communicator should use his next freshet of words on behalf of a durable immigration law, a sensible gun fix and some measures to counter the view of a narrow majority of citizens who now believe our best days are behind us. The press, which is all of us now, every blogger on a beach and tweeter at a traffic light, can pledge to stay inside the fact bubble. People who get their reality from Karl Rove at Fox or Rush Limbaugh on the radio woke up on the Election Day-after to the consequences of listening to political malpractice, live. It's not just "the other side of the story" to say that global warming is a hoax or that Barack Obama is not an American citizen. It's a serious injection of misinformation into a nation already woefully misinformed. And it's a lapse for responsible journalists to air "both sides" without calling out the lie on one. A quick way to keep fresh sewage from the municipal reservoir of truth is for everyone to turn off their Twitter feed from Donald Trump. That man is so deep in the hole of demagoguery that he would need five years of silence in a Tibetan monastery just to get back to ground level. Of late, we have doubters of Hillary's Clinton's blood clot and concussion, led by the deplorable former "diplomat" John Bolton, who speaks to fellow conspiracy theorists via Fox. In suggesting that the secretary of state was faking an illness to avoid testifying about Benghazi, Libya, Bolton moved onto Trump Island. Can he be forced to stick with facts when he opens his mouth? No, but he can be shamed. Or better yet, ignored. For lovers of the written word, our nation turns its tired eyes to women, who buy more books than men and keep many a small bookstore alive. But this year, can we resolve that fewer of them will be reading 50 shades of poorly written sadomasochistic fantasies? What do women want, goes the lament. To be cuffed and whipped by a billionaire, apparently. That's sooooo 2012. As for men, I can speak for football nation in saying our beginnings could not be more promising as of this Sunday, when Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks' rookie quarterback not quite 5-feet-11-inches tall, meets Robert Griffin III, another first-year man, more popular than any living person in Washington. Football lost whatever artistry it had in the concussion age. But with Wilson and RGIII it has regained its slippery guile. And finally, a personal resolution: to stop saying "literally" when I'm not being literal. O.K., I saw that on a T-shirt a stroke before midnight, after ingesting a bit of the grape and the grain. I will try to keep the vow at least to the spring thaw.