Maureen Dowd and the Ghost of Christmas Laziness

Everyone's mailing it in this time of year. We've spent so much time wandering around malls and chain bookstores with attached coffee shops wishing that we'd written one of those goddamn songs that gets played approximately 40,000 times a day between Halloween and Christmas so that we could have personal shoppers worry about what the perfect gift for this or that person is and so that we wouldn't go totally broke trying to impress our loved ones. The days are colder and darker and somehow the end of the year, however arbitrarily placed, gets us depressed about our general lack of economic or social mobility over the past twelve months. So we get lazy. Dishes are left in the sink longer, inadequate gifts purchased, plasticky gift basket food replaces dinner and we blow off as much of our jobs as we possibly can.
This makes it the perfect time of the year for New York Times Op Ed columnists. They can write their usual recycling the same crap over and over again drivel and their readers will just assume that holiday stress is the cause. Now, I feel for Op Ed columnists. It can't be easy to have to write two short pieces a week on a six figure salary. It must be difficult to live up to the assumption that if one gets paid to write what one thinks, then one must have interesting thoughts. But, sometimes, their laziness is almost shocking. No, I'm not talking about the fact that Kristof recently brought up those two sex workers who he "rescued" so long ago, and no I'm not talking about whatever mindless, repeating the same baseless mantra over and over again crap that Friedman is always trying to shove down our throats. Frankly, anything other than shameless self-promotion and constant over-simplification would be shocking at this point from either of them. But, Maureen Dowd (from whom we certainly expect very little) actually devoted today's entire column to telling us what Donald Trump thinks about everyone else. Forget, for the moment, the fact that we can find out what Donald Trump thinks on just about every cable news show and celebrity gossip column. She, essentially, passed her job onto him for the day. Sure, she actually typed it up and threw in some of her tired, tired snark for good measure, but she left the Opinion part of Op Ed to him. Couldn't she spend her column trying to decide what nickname she should give to Robert Gates? (My money's on Gatesy or maybe Rummy 2) Granted it's Christmas, but Maureen Dowd probably has a personal shopper. She didn't, as far as I know, write any timeless Christmas classic, but she doesn't seem to have any trouble singing the same tired tune.