On Friday, Billmon found himself compelled to give up on parody for a while. He had posted over-the-top parody of Republican attack-dog politics, accusing Richard Clarke of racism for criticizing Condi Rice, only to find Darth Novak using the same line in all seriousness on CNN.

This presented an opportunity for folks like Tom Friedman to shield themselves from all future parody by merely spouting off lines that no parodist could hope to top. Like this:

I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. Not one second. Not one story.

Lord knows, it's not out of indifference to 9/11. It's because I made up my mind about that event a long time ago: It was not a failure of intelligence, it was a failure of imagination. We could have had perfect intelligence on all the key pieces of 9/11, but the fact is we lacked — for the very best of reasons — people with evil enough imaginations to put those pieces together and realize that 19 young men were going to hijack four airplanes for suicide attacks against our national symbols and...

So, he believes our national security authority is too blinkered too even imagine how we might be attacked. And that's a good thing. Fortunately he's wrong -- while Clarke was getting support, in the Clinton administration, he specifically planned for 9/11 style attacks against the Olympics and other events, which Clarke was trying to upgrade into a full-time capability. But Friedman was talking about the suicide attacks against our national symbols (while Dubya had Clarke sidelined) when al-Qaeda tried to ...

... kill as many innocent civilians as they could, for no stated reason at all.

Yo, Tom. Bin Laden. Fatwa. 1998. Look into it. But hey, our double-Pulitzer-prizewinner is not ashamed of showing his ignorance. He just finished bragging about it.

He goes on to recite a long list of things he wishes he could read about in the morning news. (He reads it on AOL). You know what I wish I could read? Op-ed columns from people who give a damn about getting their facts straight.

Oh, great. I've gone Dennis Miller on him. In ten years, I am doomed to be a burned-out knee-jerk conservative husk of my already insubstantial former self. Kill me now...