Senator Byron Dorgan is retiring! I know this comes as a shock to you, people. Also Senator Chris Dodd! We are only one week into the new year, and the political world is in turmoil. It’s a wonder we can continue on with our regular duties.

Two Democratic senators quitting is seen as a terrible portent for 2010. (“Democrats’ Black Tuesday,” said a headline on MSNBC.) That seems a tad overblown given the fact that six Republican senators already have announced their retirements.

Plus, Dodd has been in terrible trouble back home ever since he ran for president and tried to get a jump on the competition by moving his family to Iowa. Connecticut has feelings, too. When your senator registers his daughter in kindergarten in Des Moines, the voters in Bridgeport don’t feel the love.

It’s really all good for the Nutmeg State Democrats. Dodd can leave with dignity. He has an overall record to be proud of, including a major role in health care reform. He also worked very hard on issues that have no political payoff whatsoever, like early childhood education.

In his place, the Democrats can nominate the popular attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who has been waiting in the wings since Cyndi Lauper was at the top of the charts. He was the Democrats’ young man on the rise in the ‘70s, and he’s been attorney general for nearly 20 years. It’s a good thing Dodd decided to get out of the way now or when Blumenthal’s turn came, Connecticut would have wound up electing a new senator who looked like Robert Byrd without seniority.

Blumenthal’s opponent might turn out to be Linda McMahon, who formerly ran World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince. There are other, perhaps better, Republican candidates in the race, but I am rooting for McMahon for entertainment value. She used to be a central character in cable wrestling shows whose scripts had family members shrieking, betraying and, occasionally, slugging one another. One episode featured a villain who broke into the “palatial McMahon headquarters” while Linda was recovering from a neck injury that she had received when an aggrieved wrestler flipped her upside down and slammed her head onto the floor. “You are a rather aggressive beauty, aren’t you?” he breathed, before forcing a kiss upon her resistant lips and promising to break both her son’s legs.

Lately, there have not been all that many good times on the political front. In Washington, the Democrats are sulky about Obama spending all his political capital on health care while the sane people in both parties are completely freaked out by the tea partiers. Meanwhile, interested civilians are being required to spend an excessive amount of time worrying about cloture votes and yearning for the good old days when the only senators you had to know anything about were your own.

Until recently, all I knew about Byron Dorgan was that he was a populist from North Dakota who had once been named Person of the Year by the durum wheat growers. Now he is the center of the universe.

In North Dakota, Democrats are petitioning him to change his mind and run again. The 60th vote could hang on it! Nobody seemed to have expected Dorgan to call it quits even though he has been a professional politician since he was 26 and made history as the most youthful person ever appointed to the North Dakota Tax Commission.

Now the guy is 67 years old, and he says he wants to write books and teach. I think we should give him a thumbs up on his new life plan, except for the part about how he might “also like to work on energy policy in the private sector.” That sure does sound like a lobbyist, but perhaps it just means investing in a gas station.

I’m beginning to suspect that he doesn’t expect to go back to North Dakota at all. I am basing this mainly on the fact that the “Notable North Dakotans” page on the Byron Dorgan Web site lists 19 people, none of whom seem to actually live there. In fact, seven of them are dead and one of the others is the guy who is married to the pop star Fergie.

No wonder that when Dorgan bolted, a top North Dakota Democrat instantly called Ed Schultz, the former Fargo native turned MSNBC talk-show host, and asked him if he had ever thought about running for the Senate. Even the people in North Dakota don’t seem to think there are any actual residents left in the state.

You’re giving yourself too little credit, North Dakota Democrats. There’s got to be a potential junior senator somewhere in your 641,000 fine residents. Who, of course, get exactly the same number of Senate votes as the 36.8 million people in California. But that’s a complaint for another day.