I had to catch a train in Washington last week. The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. Our country needs a renewal.

And that is why I still hope Michael Bloomberg will reconsider running for president as an independent candidate, if only to participate in the presidential debates and give our two-party system the shock it needs.

Sure, yes, that is a very logical progression. “I had crappy cellphone service on the train because of the two-party system. Save me, Mayor Bloomberg.” In Bloomberg’s America, calls wouldn’t be dropped! Under Bloomberg’s aegis, every single escalator in New York is operational. Men are escalated to and from basements and mezzanines like kings in our shimmering parking garages that are an inspiration to the world.

Because he is a sophist and a fool, Friedman takes mild inconveniences suffered on a trip from one enclave of wealth and power to another to be proof of national decline and his prescription is based primarily on clapping really hard for Tinkerbell.

Bloomberg doesn’t have to win to succeed — or even stay in the race to the very end. Simply by running, participating in the debates and doing respectably in the polls — 15 to 20 percent — he could change the dynamic of the election and, most importantly, the course of the next administration, no matter who heads it. By running on important issues and offering sensible programs for addressing them — and showing that he had the support of the growing number of Americans who describe themselves as independents — he would compel the two candidates to gravitate toward some of his positions as Election Day neared. And, by taking part in the televised debates, he could impose a dose of reality on the election that would otherwise be missing. Congress would have to take note.

THE NEAR FUTURE: Mitch McConnell picks up the day’s Washington Post. A1 headline: “BLOOMBERG CALLS FOR SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS ON IMPORTANT ISSUES.” McConnell gasps! “Get me Boehner,” he shouts. “It’s time to get serious on comprehensive revenue-raising tax reform, and escalator repair.”

What I enjoy most about this column is that it comes as the Times’ grown-up columnists were having a debate about the merits and goals of “centrism” that had at least some sort of connection to observable political reality. Then little Tommy Friedman arrives with his touching plea for the magical third-party man to solve all of America’s problems (broken escalators) with his centrism wizard staff. You can’t even refute his argument, because there is no argument. “America needs leaders who share all of the priorities of the current administration but who have Big Ideas like fixing this broken escalator with tax reform.”

Last week, Krugman wrote a column attacking so-called “centrists” who defend the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticize the president for being too “partisan” about it. The column came a few days after Mr. Brooks defended the Paul Ryan budget plan and criticized the president for being too “partisan” about it.

Yesterday, former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is now an opinion columnist despite his distinct lack of interesting opinions, attempted to defend the honor of centrists in a column in which he once again fundamentally misunderstands the argument against “centrism” as a philosophy: It depends entirely on finding the middle point between two extremes, and in our national politics right now, the middle point between two extremes is almost invariably “the Democratic Party agenda.” An ideological moderate has an ally in Barack Obama. The pathological centrist, on the other hand, dreams of a candidate whose beliefs are directly between Obama and Romney, even though such a candidate would be more conservative than “moderate.”

Keller defends his argument with research provided by “Third Way,” a centrist think tank dedicated to pushing the Democratic Party ever further to the right. According to “Third Way” polls, Democrats can only win by appealing to people exactly like the founders of Third Way: “pro-business” deficit hawks. “Pro-business” deficit hawks tend to be massively overrepresented in New York and Washington elite circles, so an argument that everyone else in America thinks the same way has a certain appeal to someone like Bill Keller. It is all bullshit: “Fiscally conservative, socially liberal” voters represent a slim minority of a slim minority of actual voters, even if they also represent a majority of newspaper and magazine editors.

Keller is maybe not the best example of the important role of the “centrist” in the American political arena, as he is one of those many “centrists” whose dedication to “centrism” led him to push for war against Iraq as a means of retaliating against an entirely different group of people who had attacked us on 9/11. The radical, extreme leftist view, at the time, was that maybe we don’t really need to invade and occupy Iraq, and many of those sage centrists now share that opinion.

Here is Brooks’ first paragraph:

Jeremy Lin is anomalous in all sorts of ways. He’s a Harvard grad in the N.B.A., an Asian-American man in professional sports. But we shouldn’t neglect the biggest anomaly. He’s a religious person in professional sports.

Here is the next sentence:

We’ve become accustomed to the faith-driven athlete and coach, from Billy Sunday to Tim Tebow.

Haha OK. This is the point where you hit “select all” and then “delete” and start your column again. Brooks must’ve started this thing like 10 minutes before his deadline. (No time to edit it!)

So, yes, a “religious person in professional sports” is like the least anomalous thing in the world, besides maybe “a racist comment under a YouTube video.” Or “an old white guy in political punditry.” (Also, minor note, but: I think there’s actually a decent number — enough to make Lin not particularly “anomalous” — of prominent Asians and Asian-Americans in professional sports, unless you’re only defining “Asian-American” as “of East Asian descent” and you’re only counting the “big four” leagues as “professional sports.” And you’re not really counting baseball.)

While Lin’s Christianity is obviously of great importance to Lin, it honestly has barely anything to do with what made him an instant superstar, except for when hacks want to compare him to Tim Tebow, which is dumb, because Lin is suddenly famous because he’s really good at his sport while Tebow’s whole shtick is succeeding despite being awful at being a quarterback. (If Lin had been a college superstar and high draft pick who was famously inept at the fundamentals of his position, the Tebow thing would be an accurate comparison, but Lin is in fact the opposite of that.)

Having contradicted his own faulty premise five sentences into his column, Brooks rambles on about how he has noticed that being good at sports and being pious is sort of contradictory, because being good at sports doesn’t involve much “humility” or “self-abnegation.” Then we have some boilerplate theological musings, about how sports is like modern society and how Abrahamic religious values contradict modern cultural values, especially regarding individual achievement. (YAWN.)

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

For many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue. You achieve loftiness of spirit by performing the most menial services. (That’s why shepherds are perpetually becoming kings in the Bible.) You achieve your identity through self-effacement. You achieve strength by acknowledging your weaknesses. You lead most boldly when you consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause.

I could be wrong, but “consider yourself an instrument of a larger cause” is basically step three of “how to be good at team sports,” after “be gifted physically” and “practice a lot.” (And acknowledging your weaknesses? Like when Magic would spend the off-season practicing “the weakest part of his game” until he improved it?)

The “two moral universes” of religion and societal achievement may be “irreconcilable” — I am not a religious person and hence don’t care — but that has very little to do with Jeremy Lin, or basketball, or politics, which Brooks for some reason brings up in the last paragraph, because he wants to pretend this column has been about something other than extended free-associative riffing on the fact that a famous person is religious.

In conclusion, the New York Times should probably consider having someone take a quick glance at David Brooks’ columns before they publish them.

I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

In Brisbane’s formulation, when a reporter corrects a falsehood made by a source or public figure, that reporter is a “truth vigilante,” because he or she took the truth into his or her own hands, before some slick fast-talking lawyer got the lie out of truth-jail on a technicality. (Hand in your truth-badge and truth-gun, New York Times! You’re getting too close! That untrue assertion has major connections at City Hall!)

Another line: “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” Haha what? Probably?

Basically everyone on the Internet is slack-jawed and stunned by this entire thing, because, man, “should we print the truth or not” is a hilarious question to just throw out to readers.

(The “public editor” has no power or authority at the Times, for the record. It is just the Times’ phrase for “crusty old newspaper veteran who answers reader complaints about stock photo usage and anonymous sourcing by hassling editors to give him defensive quotes for his column,” or “ombudsman.” The position was created after Jayson Blair published a bunch of untrue “facts” in the newspaper. The Times eventually corrected those “facts.”)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.