What's 170 Days Between Friends?

This will make you want to cry (unless you've already checked out).

David Brooks on last night's NewsHour:

JIM LEHRER: All right, so just carry it another step your way, David. Let's say they go ahead and re-do Michigan and Florida and it's still not resolved. So then what?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, there are a bunch of possibilities. If it's still unresolved after all that, maybe they have some sort of deal. And I think you've got to think radically about this. All sorts of things will be on the table.

You also have to remember there will be five months, four months of bitterness, so the atmosphere will be totally different than it is now. Our friend, Peter Hart, the pollster...

JIM LEHRER: It's going to get worse before it gets...

DAVID BROOKS: It's going to get a lot worse. Peter Hart, our friend the pollster, pointed out that we're roughly now 170 days until the Democratic convention. If you go back 170 days, that's about when Fred Thompson announced for president. That was a long time ago; it's going to feel like a long time.

JIM LEHRER: Wow.

DAVID BROOKS: We're in the second quarter. We're not in the third or fourth quarter, and it's going to get uglier.

Yuck.

Here's hoping (but we're not hopeful) that time starts more quickly slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.