Today Ol’ Boner waxed (no pun intended) lyrical about the Free Market genius of the tanning industry, upon which he obviously relies for his rather distinctive appearance, and I couldn’t help but thinking such a weird statement would probably fly, poolside in Palm Springs, especially if he had a rubber flower on the side of his bathing cap, but still kind of fell flat with his intended audience.  You know, those who can’t afford to get fake tans, since they’re unemployed.   Putting it mildly, a lot of cocktailhags have been making asses of themselves lately; is it the weather?   Brewer went all ballistic about the same brown people who have undoubtedly been pouring her drinks into  pineapples all these years and clearly made herself look like the racist know-nothing she is in the process; Dowd got so pie-eyed that she actually wrote, no doubt with a lot of help from spellcheck and NYT editors, that Elena Kagan and Stanley McCrystal were (kind of) the same thing; Harman went to town declaring her primary opponent to be a terrorist,  and Quinn ruined two weddings and ended her unaccountably lengthy career with her drunken ramblings about her (mortified, and rightly estranged) family.

As a cocktailhag, I would like to offer these worthies a bit of advice, for the sake of the tribe.  1) Please consider issues about which you wish to expound before you hit the bottle.  Megalomania and drunkenness can contribute to less than clear thinking, and you only embarrass us all when you let loose so.  2) Excessive amounts of booze have become an unaffordable luxury for many Americans, none of whom have a fawning media that will flatteringly read your demented thoughts from the patterns in your vomit as you slip from incoherence into idiocy.  3)  Beer goggles only work one way.  Please make a note of it as you look at yourself in the mirror.

In the days before the civil rights movement, assimilationist African Americans often spoke of the “talented tenth” whom they thought would be their spokesmen and role models, while bemoaning the rhetorical, behavioral, and tactical excesses of the other 90%.  Suddenly, I know what they meant.  Hags, unless you want us to be a rightfully hated minority for time immemorial, please, pour yourself something, light up a More 120, and shut up.  You’re diminishing the brand.