David Broder Spends Entire Week Filling Out March Madness Bracket

We had not read a column by David Broder, "The Duchess" of the Washington press corps, since at least 1943 ("Buy War Bonds, You Chuckleheads" was the topic at the time), but a tipster told us that it was funny today and yeah, it's very funny today. It is just benign mumbling about basketball and vacations and his hometown with a few perfunctory Obama references for good measure. Yeah.

With the usual phoned-in old white male Beltway insider hack deathly newspapery title of "Mr. Cool's March Madness," Broder... oh what the fuck, are we actually going to bother making criticisms of David Broder at this point? Eh. Just let him talk about why he didn't write a column last week, as you all surely noticed.

I took the week off to focus on filling out my brackets for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.I have never done particularly well at doping out this tournament, but last year was particularly poor -- even though the four No. 1's all proved that the seeding was right.

No but really, he's serious.

This year I was determined not to lose my focus, so I shut down reporting for the full week leading into the first-round games last Thursday and Friday.

Even retirement communities ridden with shrieking dementia-suffering banshees, the permanent wheelchair-bound people, the involuntary spitters and pissers whom the night staff eventually pushes into the artificial lake after being referred to as "colored" one too many times, eventheywould laugh at how old and slow David Broder is.

The bad news is that it wasn't distraction that explained my sorry performance in the NCAA pool. I just can't judge basketball. This year, 20 of my 32 first-round picks lost -- almost as bad as the 21-11 negative score I had in 2008. Some of it can be blamed on sentiment. I went with American University because I drive through its Washington campus almost every week, and I picked five Big Ten teams because they were my boyhood favorites, even though experts had pronounced this an off-year for everyone except Michigan State and Purdue.

Just a great column here. Guy spends a whole week away from his job so as to focus on picking 32 basketball games, then he ends up deciding based on whether he drives through a particular college regularly (HE DRIVES!) or whether that college was in his childhood's favorite conference -- again, not favorite individual team, but favorite conference, the whole thing, he loved them all, rivalries or not...

But that's okay. It must be nice to have that kind of job security, though.

 Mr. Cool's March Madness [WP]