"If you are dumb enough to think that New York values are some sort of handicap in this presidential season, then you are as dumb and tone deaf as Jesse Jackson was calling the city 'Hymietown'..."

"... as dumb as Gerald Ford was when he gave this paper the most famous front page in its history, the day he effectively told New York to drop dead. The next time Cruz shows up here he should tear himself away from his friends at Goldman Sachs and make a side trip to the Bronx and explain himself there on New York values; or to the Lower East Side, or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Jamaica, Queens, or 125th St. in Harlem. He should go talk to people in the Rockaways or Staten Island, the hardened survivors who bound together after Hurricane Sandy, about New York values. Or finally he should go all the way downtown, and back to September 2001. Here is what New York values are: New York values are a young guy, a paralegal, literally giving somebody he doesn’t know the shirt off his back on a subway because winter has finally come to the city and brought freezing temperatures with it. New York values are the New York taxi driver who traveled three boroughs across four days to find the guy who had left $1,400 in his cab, so he could return the money to him. You know what that really was? It was the real life of a city that Ted Cruz knows nothing about. He is simply another tourist here, one constantly on the make."

Writes Mike Lupica in The New York Daily News, ending with the send-off "City to him: Get lost."

Are we "still supposed to believe that his wife, Elin Nordegren, somehow turned one of Tiger's Nike SQ drivers into the Jaws of Life"?

"Woods was driving a Cadillac Escalade out of his own driveway, which is the same as driving a tank. He wasn't going fast enough to deploy his air bags. But we're supposed to believe that in a rescue worthy of the new series, 'Trauma,' his wife had to bust a back window to pull her husband to safety after he ran over a fire hydrant and into a tree."

Mike Lupica tells Tiger Woods to get his story out — whatever it is.

AND, from the comments of Fridays's Tiger Woods post: a poem, by David (with "deep apologies" to William Blake):

Tiger, Tiger, that wasn't too bright.
Grabbin' the Caddy and takin' flight.
Perhaps the very lovely Ellin
Some Tiger hanky-pank was smellin'?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what pussy fried thee thy brain?
What the putter? What the wood?
What, her lawyer? Gonna whup you good.

AND: From Inwood follows David with his own "Tiger, Tiger":

TIGER, tiger, not so bright
In the caddy late at night,
What immortal hand or eye
Have framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or drain
Burnt the fire of thy brain
What babe you been A-W-O-L-in?
What you think that do to Ellin?

When Ellin threw your clubs like spears
Did’st water heaven with thy tears?
Did she smile her work to see?
Will she who made this ruin ruin thee?

"Loons should shut up and listen: Obama not out to brainwash schoolkids."

Obviously, you can't really be talking to people you call "loons."

It seems that Mike Lupica is amusing his readers who want the opposition to shut up. (When did "shut up" become a liberal argument?)

Here's the end of Lupica's shut-up-loons column:

Some of this is racial, though Obama's critics would never see themselves as being racist in a million years.

And the sense that criticizing the President is racial, is that racial? I'm guessing Mike Lupica wouldn't see himself as being racist in a million years.

But there is something more going on, not just white versus black but white hats versus black hats, on both sides of politics, both the right and left selling conflict with both hands, trying to give you a Civil War every night on Cable America because that's where the ratings are.

Only it's not civil. And somehow the most gullible people have been convinced that the enemy is anybody who disagrees with them. About anything.

Maybe the ones who fear Obama the most, the ones who hate him the most, should try doing what a lot of schoolchildren will do tomorrow, as this President tries to inspire them:

As a change of pace, maybe they should stop shouting and listen.

Oh, wait! Mike Lupica never wrote the words "shut up and listen." He wrote: "stop shouting and listen."

And he doesn't call anyone "loon" either. But somehow the headline writer read his column and came up with "Loons should shut up and listen."

I guess it's not just "Cable America" that's "trying to give us a Civil War" and "selling conflict with both hands." It's Lupica's newspaper, the Daily News, reading his column that — irony! — calls for civility.

Or did the headline writer pick up Lupica's real message, which was not the "civility" business padding page 2? The real message is: Obama's opponents are crazy/racist/stupid and should not be talking. And if you protest that characterization you're being uncivil.

Now, fold your little hands on your desk and pay attention, children.