Well-meaning but inept New York Times columnist Frank Bruni is living proof that being a newspaper columnist is harder than it looks. As a normal newspaper writer and food critic, he seemed like a smart, erudite guy; as a columnist, he has proven to be remarkably free of insight or interesting ideas of any sort. Say, did you catch Frank Bruni's column Sunday entitle "The Land of the Binge?" If not, allow us to sum it up for you.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a mustachioed humanoid robot with a limited vocabulary, was programmed by his creators to do whatever it takes to get his simple, cartoonish message across, even if that means repeating that message over and over and over without end in the nation's premier news outlet until all of us bow down and accept it, just to get him to stop saying it.

In Murgatroid, Ohio—a perfectly average small American town, in a perfectly average American state, where perfectly average Americans do not so average things—the day begins, as it does elsewhere, with alarm clocks, the cries of cuckoo birds, and the collective "Thshhh" sound of apple pies being thrust onto windowsills from North Snooker Street all the way down to South Shoobadoop Avenue. The sun's rays, golden in that way that rays are, peek over the horizon. It is morning in Murgatroid. Once again, a small town full of Americans bestirs itself for the unexpectedly inspiring day ahead.

Imagine what it must be like to be the editor of globalism's Rain Man, Thomas Friedman. Your job, ostensibly, is to hammer this man's prose into some semblance of logical readability, and yet he has built a fabulously lucrative career on his total lack of logic, readability, or, really, variety of any kind. Clearly, his editors have now made the only sensible choice: "Eh, just put that shit right in the paper exactly how he typed it on his Blackberry." (*Big shot of heroin*)

Anonymous leaked 1 million Apple device IDs last week, claiming they were found on an FBI laptop. This had the unexpected result of me wearing a tutu and putting a shoe on my head in order to elicit more information from the hacktivist group. But an NBC report has revealed the leak actually came from a boring app developer. Anonymous is full of shit—but at least everyone on the internet got to see my legs.

Anonymous really wants to see a picture of me wearing a ballet tutu with a shoe on my head. This is the hacker collective's condition for releasing more information about their latest blockbuster leak, for some reason.

Doddering Reaganite WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan is an authority, of sorts, on the browner peoples of America. She once saw a Mexican. It naturally falls to Peggy, then, to get to la corazon of the Republican convention speech of New Mexico governor Susana Martinez. (Or "Susan," as Peggy calls her, for assimilationist purposes.)

Goodbye, Tampa. I'm leaving you. When I think back on our time together, I will always remember the immortal words of ODB:

If bad newspaper columnist Frank Bruni ever decides to take his milquetoast musings to a new industry, he should consider becoming the guy who writes the little inspirational slogans that appear on marketing materials inside the Coca-Cola— Pavilion at the Olympic Games™. He's already had his tryout!

Barry Eisler, a former CIA agent turned novelist, has put forth a handy checklist that journalists can use to determine just how co-opted they have become by the very powers over which they are supposed to be serving as a watchdog. It can help any reporter decide just how far down the road to hackdom they've traveled so far. It's like one of those online personality tests, but it tells you exclusively how much of a sellout you are.

Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams is America's least necessary cultural critic. Reading a Mary Elizabeth Williams column on any topic in the news is like sticking a needle full of SUPER SWEET SUGAR WATER in your veins and pushing the plunger until you say "Blaaaauuurrrrgghhhhpablumpablum." Does Mary Elizabeth Williams have something unnecessary—so unnecessary that it would have been a net gain to humanity to say nothing at all—to say on the topic of our recent Very Sad Aurora Movie Theater Shooting Tragedy? Yes of course she does. If you had hoped to avoid it, you lose.

Fabulously wealthy CEO whisperer and newspaper columnist Thomas Friedman is little more than a human-shaped random word generator programmed with the "Computers and Internet" section of a fourth-grade vocabulary textbook and fitted with a mustache. He writes one single column, sometimes using different proper nouns or cycling through slightly new platitudes, in order to allow a new headline to be written. The Only Thomas Friedman Column That Exists—which ran right on schedule yesterday—opens like this:

I don't know about you, but when I think "People who made the wrong career choice," I think "Albert Einstein." Talk about wasting your smarts! Instead of writing papers on math things that the average consumer doesn't even understand, he could have been writing slogans, for Kit Kats™. Missed opportunities.

Yesterday, a tipster sent us a note indicating that he had successfully accessed Mitt Romney's Hotmail and DropBox accounts after guessing the answer to a security question—Romney's favorite pet. The Romney campaign later confirmed that "the proper authorities are investigating [the] crime." Now that tipster has written a letter of apology to Romney. Here it is.

Everything old is new again: A tipster has emailed Gawker claiming to have hacked into Mitt Romney's private email and DropBox accounts.

Mustachioed aspic Tom Friedman has written a thousand words in today's New York Times about Paul Simon. The point of the column seems to be, basically, that there's a new documentary about Simon's album Graceland, and also Paul Simon is Tom Friedman's friend.

The thing that every "Life" or "Style" or "Pop culture" columnist must keep in mind at all times is that the things they write about are not important. (I include much of Gawker.com's content in this sweeping generalization.) These types of columnists do not write about economic policy, or international relations, or genocide or poverty or war. They just write about the latest bit of eye-catching news-lite distraction, like everybody else on the internet. Because of this, there is absolutely no excuse for these pap columnists not to take a firm stand on the "issues." Because it doesn't matter!

Richard Cohen is (for some reason) employed as a professional opinion columnist by the Washington Post. He is paid to write columns—featuring his own opinions—about the issues of the day. This is the entirety of his job. Yet Richard Cohen has a wondrous talent possessed by few in his rarefied sphere: he can write an entire opinion column with zero actual opinion.

Yesterday, former Gawkerer and current Salon writer Alex Pareene wrote a completely accurate and well-deserved knife-twisting takedown of Jonah Goldberg, the National Review's most youthful self-impressed hack. If you are unsure as to whether or not Jonah Goldberg is a hack, I encourage you to read Pareene's piece in full. Besides being a hack, we'd like to point out that Jonah Goldberg is also the most sniveling sort of armchair warrior bitch.

Hirsute-lipped Sesame Street character Thomas Friedman, America's most respected newspaper columnist, does not "have it easy," just because he lives in a sprawling mansion and holds a job that consists of rewriting the same exact column over and over again every week, merely substituting different—but equally trivial—anecdotes gleaned while looking out of the window of a car, train, or airplane in which Thomas Friedman rode on his way to meet some business person.