These guys need brains for Christmas

What’s happened to the holiday spirit?

This is supposed to be the Tiny Tim season of trust. This is supposed to be that special time of year when we all rise above our Scroogey nature and fill our hearts with the eggnog of human kindness.

Bah humbug!

These days the American Civil Liberties Union will sue the jingle bells off anyone with a baby Jesus in a manger. The public schools treat the word “Christmas” as if it were a lewd Ludacris lyric.

And now it seems you can’t even have a dope-for-machine gun exchange without everyone involved lying like the stained carpet in a cheap motel.

What’s happened to us, people?

I slipped into a real holiday funk after reading a brief story in Wednesday’s newspaper.

According to the Spokane Sheriff’s Office, two dudes were arrested after they offered to trade a bag of meth for a machine gun from another dude in a Home Depot parking lot.

Allegedly.

Before any of you last-minute Christmas shoppers get ideas, I want to make something completely clear:

Home Depot does NOT sell machine guns.

I once bought a caulking gun at a Home Depot. And I believe carpenters can buy nail guns there although I’ve never found the need for one. I have enough trouble getting a hammer to work.

So don’t – I repeat – don’t bother asking any of the helpful Home Depot workers to point you to the machine gun aisle.

It ain’t gonna happen.

But getting back to our story: Police say two dudes who wanted the machine gun forked over the “drugs” to the other dude.

Civics professors refer to this as the barter system.

Take it from me, it really works. Just the other day I traded my friend Scott three of my band CDs and two of my band T-shirts for a used snowblower and some yard waste removal.

Scott was happy. Doug was happy.

That’s the way the barter system is supposed to work.

But this parking lot deal was shadier than a Halliburton-Iraq contract.

First off, the meth turned out to be rock salt.

As far as I know, no crank addict ever stayed up all night tweaking like a sprung monkey on rock salt.

And while some cities put salt on the streets this time of year, that doesn’t mean salt has a street value.

But this was just Phase One of the treachery.

As the fake drug dudes discovered to their dismay, the machine gun dude was a big fat liar as well.

He was really an undercover cop.

This got one dude jailed on a charge of possessing an unregistered machine gun.

Of course it was unregistered. Hello. He just traded a cop a bag of salt for it.

The other dude was booked into jail on a charge of “delivering or possessing a counterfeit narcotic substance.”

These numbskulls should have been charged with felonious stupidity, too.

How brainless do you have to be to trade fake dope for a real machine gun? Did these nitwits ever stop to consider that anyone willing to let go of one real machine gun just might have a spare real machine gun back at home.

And, hey, he just might go get it and turn them into Swiss cheese when he finds out they gave him A BAG OF FREAKING SALT!

Whatever happened to peace on earth, good will to men?

Where did those holly, jolly good times go?

We’re all getting so jaded. Take another depressing news story that appeared in the paper this week.

A North Side Costco had to be evacuated Monday when a man inside began stabbing and slashing himself.

On his way out of the store, an unidentified shopper was quoted as saying: “It looks like shopping season has started.”

Elvis was right.

It’s a blue, blue Christmas.