Dear Conservatives

As you lurch wildly back and forth between fetishistic obsession with overwhelming firepower and ominous yawping about "Second Amendment remedies" every time anyone from the gummint looks at you funny ...and a smirking certainty that any unarmed black kid in America who is gunned down by any cop or wannabe cop somehow "had it coming"...I know how reeeeeeally hard your have been trying to forget all about those overtly seditious and deeply deranged mash notes you wrote during your torrid three-way with Sean Hannity and Klavern Bundy last Spring.

But we didn't forget.

In fact, the minute you bring up "Ferguson" at Thanksgiving, expect to hear us repeat -- over and over again, very loudly -- "Cliven Bundy".

Cliven Bundy.

Cliven Bundy.

Where was all you hatred of moochers when the moocher was Cliven Bundy?

Where was all your "If you act in any way that any cop or wannabe cop might interpret as in any way disrespectful or intimidating  -- even if you're unarmed -- you deserve what you get!" moralizing it was Cliven Bundy and his merry band of armed bigots?

We don't expect and answer, any more than we have ever really expected you to answer any of the other hundreds of deeply embarrassing questions stemming from all those bedrock moral beliefs you pretended to have under Clinton...which you then summarily jettisoned under Bush...and then miraculously rediscovered under Obama.  

And frankly, we'd all really rather just spend a peaceful holiday sharing stories and memories of family and friends, both here and gone. 

But if you insist on going there, expect us to make you regret it.

Today In David Brooks...

Today Mr. Brooks wrote about friendship in the modern world.

It wasn't particularly controversial or insightful, but it left me feeling rather sad.

Sad, because I realized that, in the long line columns that stretch out behind him, virtually all of David Brooks' work has ultimately been entirely forgettable. A concatenation of cold, dead mile-markers of contractually prescribed lengths pegged into the dirt at contractually prescribed intervals. Yes, the collective weight of their biases and dishonesties have horribly deformed the political landscape, but from a strictly writerly point of view, can anyone remember, for example, any startlingly good opening lines?

Any closer that made you go "Wow!" or at least want to kick a bastard in the ass?

Any sentence that ever leaped out and knocked you off your log?

A single, laser-cut phrase that Mr. Brooks has hewn from our cultural granite which -- whether you agree with it or not -- you could at least admire for the shapely turn it took as it came off the lathe?

A single chord that sounds like no other?

Truth is, there is nothing much human about his words on the page.

Once upon a time (before it all blew up in his face) Mr. Brooks used to be able to get up a full head of sneering condemnation for Iraq war opponents, and these days, like a dry fever, he occasionally musters a kind of dissipated, viperish contempt for some massive individual or institutional failure...which he then obsessively cuts down the middle and apportions to both sides of the argument equally because he dare not call his demons by their true names.

But today, on a subject as monumental and as overflowing with primal grief and joy as that of "friendship", Mr. Brooks has managed to yet again extrude an entire column without a whisper of blood in its veins: an entire work of public art (because whatever else it is, or however well or poorly it is done, writing is damn well art) on this ancient and bountiful topic for the nation's newspaper of record...which read like an executive summary of the finer, technical points of network packet switching interlaced with an alien zoologists report of the social habits of human "flocks".

No hint of exuberance, or terror, or swagger, or loss. Just...nothing...which I find artistically wasteful, spiritually mingy and ultimately just fucking sad.

And so, rather than take up your valuable time reading the thing, here are seven minutes and 16 seconds of much, much better writing on the same subject.

Breaking: Chris says that Scott says that Sarah

may or may not be up to something.

Erik notes that Tom, Dave, Another Chris, Mark, Mary Lu, and the Same Scott all have different opinions about what Sarah may-or-may-not be up to, some of which agree or disagree to some degree with others, and some of which are based on speculation about what Mitt, Bill and Mike might have been up to on somewhat similar previous occasions.