You know how at the end ofTop Gun, Iceman (Val Kilmer) still doesn't agree with Maverick (Tom Cruise) on just about anything, but he has a renewed respect for his wild and woolly unorthodox style, plus everything is very gay? Today, like every day, we are all Val Kilmer. And surprise! Your new Tom Cruise is Glenn Beck. (Because of Shirley Sherrod.)

Here is Our Most Revered Saint of the Chalkboards on Monday, discussing the firing of your favorite once-and-probably-not-future USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod:

Whether we homosexual radical leftist socialist Al Qaeda fascists like it or not, what this frequently wild-eyed infotainer says matters to a lot of people. Maybe they are mostly the type of people you would not want to be your friend/lover/private dancer, and maybe many of them are aggressively ignorant and/or irrational and/or really annoying, particularly at Thanksgiving when they are your relatives and you have to pretend to like them when actually you want to bury them behind a giant wall of rock-hard congealed turkey fat, "Cask of Amontillado"-style.

But this is exactly why it is a bigger deal for Glenn Beck to defend Shirley Sherrod than it is for, say, our rightly-beloved Rachel Maddow to do so. Rachel Maddow is great! But one would expect Rachel Maddow to probe this matter further and sensibly and liberaliciously analyze it, all while looking smokin' as heck. One would not expect the same of Monsieur Beck. But he did it!

And after most sentient beings had come around to his way of thinking, Glenn Beck explained why he hadn't rushed to judge Shirley Sherrod, and it all made sense. Your New Sara was so impressed that she even wrote him an old-fashioned pen-and-paper email to say so! What kind of a crazy world is this, in which such things occur?

I watched Shirley Sherrod on CNN with the handsomest man on television, Mr. Tony "Benincasa" Harris, and I cried. Then I read your Jack Stuef's barbaric yawp of righteous indignation, and I also cried at this! Theeeen I watched clips from Glenn Beck, and I cried again! Here is why I will never make fun of Glenn Beck for crying on TV: I have cried on my radio show, thrice. If I had a TV show, I would also probably cry on it sometimes!

In short, Glenn Beck and me are like peas in an emotionally unbalanced pod. Do we both not weep? Do we both not bleed? Could we both not benefit from selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors? Sometimes it is nice to realize that you have at least one thing in common with someone whose opinions you mostly abhor. Thank you, Andrew Breitbart and Tom Vilsack, for making this moment of clarity possible!