This business of ours, the blog business, is not "easy." Bloggers must have the agile minds and exquisite judgment necessary to survey all the news of the day, decide what is important and why, and bring readers along on a journey towards understanding.

Or, he can just randomly glue together the day's completely unconnected news stories, with a glue made of foolishness. Actual headline on a newly published Thought Catalog post by Nathan Savin Scott: " Lance Armstrong, The Empire State Building Shooting, And What It Means To Be American."

Should be interesting, given the scale of the current tragedy, the freshness of its wound to a city's psyche, and the fact that the two items referenced in the headline have nothing to do with one another!

And now this is the part of this essay where I tell you how I feel about it. Where I take an "angle." Where I either defend him and say that he deserves to have the medals stripped, or where I say that the USADA is acting outside their jurisdiction and should let a retired man live out his life in peace.

I was mulling it over this morning. (Yes, readers out there, newsflash. We writers mull over which side we're going to take on issues sometimes. Real life isn't The Newsroom where the capital-T Truth is so powerful we can't fight it. A lot of the time we go with what's in our hearts, but a lot of times we don't know, so we go with what will be more interesting. What will rile up the discussion more.) I was mulling over which side I was going to take, for Lance or against him, and then ten people got shot outside the Empire State Building, and my opinion on Lance Armstrong and his doping allegations was made so crystal clear that it practically shone. My opinion? I didn't care.

Nathan Savin Scott (bio: "He enjoys writing about music, sports, and was briefly a High Society reporter for Newsweek magazine. Like, seriously. He wrote about yacht races and stuff.") is here to pull back the curtain, as it were, on the dark and dirty machinations of professional journalism, for you, the unfortunate reader. Let's skip right to the grand finale, in which he brings it all home:

So go on, cyclists. Pump yourselves up with chemicals I can't pronounce. Thin your blood, thicken your blood, whatever. If it means you winning a race, and bringing some pride to America, and raising that flag over your head, and that flag will stand for something victorious and happy, and make me forget for a beautiful second the real truths about this nation, that we are a country that allows its citizens to kill each other so easily, constantly, perpetually, in front of the Empire State Building, in the streets of Hollygrove and on the South Side of Los Angeles… if you can make me forget that, even for an instant, then the doping was worth it. So go on then, cyclists, make me forget. Win your races. Hold that flag up. Make us proud.

Make us proud.

[Thought Catalog. Photo: AP]