If you're going to do a column about morals and ethics, don't hire a comedy writer. NYT Ethicist and former Letterman writer Randy Cohen has the easiest job in America, and yet he can't help pilfering questions from other columnists, as in today's repeat from Philip Galanes' "Social Q's" column in last month's paper. The paper now has more advice columnists than questions for them to answer — click for the sad Times gaffe as only they can do it.Apparently the original question was just that good, although it was edited down for Randy Cohen's smaller brain:

Minutes before my first lunch date with a man I met online, he called to cancel because he was hit by a bicycle and was in the emergency room at Roosevelt Hospital. I later called the E.R. to check on him, and a nurse said he was never there. Weeks after that, I heard about another woman with whom he used the same excuse: hit by a bike; in the E.R. Is it dater beware, or is there an obligation to be honest even online? — BETH ROSE FEUERSTEIN, LONG BEACH, N.Y.

The question itself provoked Galanes into a four paragraph rant replete with what he calls "jokes":

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a perfect delivery system of eligible men and women. And what the online world offers in terms of increased volume and speed, it tends to subtract with its profusion of cads and game-players. Next time you find one, simply report him to the site’s complaint desk, and move along to the next guy.

Yes, report him! Maybe this was just Beth Feuerstein's trial run for the big show, the Times Magazine? Cohen's column doesn't do much better:

From my narrow, crackpot’s point of view (my favorite), the real harm here is not to you but to the many tens of thousands of New York City cyclists. This fellow promulgates the canard of the pedestrian-threatening bicycle. Average number of pedestrian deaths attributable to cyclists each year here? About one. (There were 11 between 1996 and 2005.) Yet in 2006 alone, cars killed 156 pedestrians (and 17 bicyclists) in New York City and injured more than 10,000 pedestrians (and more than 2,800 bicyclists) badly enough to be hospitalized.

The Times has yet to run a correction for using the same question in two different columns, but you can be sure there's a possibility they'll screw it up somehow. Can someone also explain whose bright idea it was to give Randy Cohen a podcast? Credit the New York Times for never knowing when a column has run its course. If they exercised good editorial judgment, we wouldn't have to listen to a comedy writer crib questions from other columnists because he couldn't make up his own.