If the McCain/Palin ticket wins in November, the Gray Lady shouldn’t deck the halls with holly for the holiday season. No, sir, she should pad them to protect her writers who, fa-la-la bonkers over a world gone “out of joint,” will take every opportunity to resoundingly knock their noggins, hoping the next mad, wild-eyed bonk will somehow “set it right.”

How can I be so sure about all this? Well, just look at how McCain’s “Palin surge” has already sent the Gray Lady’s writers into a pre-psychotic state — and not just the liberals, but resident moderate Thomas Friedman.

In fact, I begin with Friedman because if he’s going loony at the prospect of a McCain presidency, he represents “the trumpet of a prophecy” that warns us to steel ourselves for a show of head knocking by his co-workers so wildly bonkers it will cause psychiatric textbooks to be re-written.

In support of the assertion that a burgeoning neurosis threatens to send Thomas Friedman across the border to the alternate universe where humans instantaneously create and change reality, I need simply point out that lately he has become monomaniacal about the notion that “Republicans...want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology.”

This, despite the fact that regarding energy, McCain has campaigned vigorously on the notion that we must “do it all.” But Tom doesn’t believe John, accusing him not only of “exalting” the old technology with the mantra “drill, baby, drill” but also of “turning everything possible into a cultural wedge issue...no matter how stupid it makes the voters.”

What a perfectly insane liberal idea — candidates can “choose” either to make voters smart or stupid, a concept, by the way, liberals also apply to government.

But I digress, for the topic here is energy, not the liberal nanny state, where guess who will serve exclusively as the high-booted nannies.

So, what’s Friedman’s energy plan? Simple, we throw “all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra ‘invent, baby, invent.’”

Good idea, as long as we remember that only the private sector can do the job. But maddeningly, Tom doesn’t say a word about the private sector, perhaps because he believes the “innovating” can be done by government, for example, the politicians and bureaucrats who innovated California’s clean, green energy machine that is the envy of the world.

And the silence continues.

Not a word about how government must play its role by making sure the rules for producing and transporting energy are such that private capital will flow to new ventures.

Not a word about when we can expect a significant supply of green energy at a cost that doesn’t destroy the nation’s standard of living.

Not a word about where the price of oil travels or the consequences of the trip, as the nation waits until 2030 and beyond for the revolution that replaces “19th-century technology.”

Not a word about the T. Boone Pickens energy bridge needed to get from “here” to “there.”

Speaking of Mr. Pickens — not a word about natural gas, most likely because bringing up this clean, plentiful fossil fuel will require Tom to utter the stupidity-inducing sentence, “Drill, baby, drill,” thereby making a dumb American population even dumber.

Finally, not a word about Barack Obama’s energy plan or how he’s going to pay for it, an especially shocking omission given that the man from Hope, Illinois, by way of Audacity, Hawaii, tells us he doesn’t mess around with multiplying a few loaves of bread and fish so that a crowd may eat once.

No siree, the audacious one promises to raise taxes on just the wealthiest segment of the population and multiply the proceeds so prodigiously that the resulting sum will pay for national health care, for a “tax break” for just about “everybody” (remember that “everybody” means the 42 million Americans who don’t pay federal income tax and thus will begin receiving a permanent federal handout), for rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, for improving public education, for college tuition grants, and for a thousand other programs — with baskets of money left over to fund a million energy innovation bureaucracies.

Well, to put it in terms of a personal journey, ignoring the implications of that insulting nonsense alone is sufficient to certify a person as traveling on the road to the town called Psychosis.

But why this nutty behavior from Tom as well as his friends?

The following piece of evidence proves it results from a deeply gnawing neurosis regarding anyone who is not a bi-coastal liberal:

Having refused to tangle with the devils in the details pertinent to solving the nation’s energy problems, including those associated with Obama’s cuckoo plan to tax an ounce and spend ten tons, Friedman reacts as follows to McCain’s call to “build dozens of nuclear power plants.”

“Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from?”

That shameless, stupid, hypocritical contradiction alone tells us all we need to know about how hard Tom Friedman might be knocking his head after the election — though the blows will be nothing compared to the stupendous slams we’ll see from Krugman, Dowd, Rich, et al.

Yessiree, the manner in which that gang is already fulminating over McCain and, especially, Palin portends a scene, come a Republican presidential November, that will establish a new frontier for behavior that is insanely volcanic in its angry, thoughtless, violent head banging.

Oh, the humanity, the humanity! (Not to mention the effect on the newspaper’s health care premiums.)

And that explains why I offer the following advice gratis:

Dear Gray Lady, If John and Sarah win, deck the halls immediately — and remember, not with boughs of holly but with the highest quality psychiatric padding on the market, the constraints imposed by your rapidly deteriorating balance sheet notwithstanding.