It was sort of like walking into an empty ice cream parlor and requiring 24 minutes to explain to the clerk that you want a cone with a single scoop of boring vanilla.

Imagine your starving spouse striding tardily into the kitchen where six guests already are seated and a steaming dinner is on the table. Before anyone can eat, however, he inhales the next 50 minutes detailing why he prefers a completely different meal.

Monopolizing the top half of the first op-page in Sunday’s edition, the Los Angeles Times overwrote, by a scant 2,000 words, its cockeyed reasoning for opposing spotless Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court vacancy.

In an editorial that may have been penned by an intern, the Times puffed, huffed and blew itself forth and back across a fruitless desert, twisted itself into an impressive gymnastic pretzel, burped and confessed in the closing sentence that it had nothing.

Frustrated, the Times belched that it had no valid reason for opposing the magnificently qualified Judge Gorsuch.

But since there was space to fill, they still were made that by darn, last year at this time, a month after Justice  Antonin Scalia’s sudden death,  the Republican-led Senate refused to consider a replacement. The GOP guys reasoned that since work-allergic President Obama was inside his last year, his successor should nominate a Scalia successor.

Harrumph. The Times drew itself up to its maximum 4-foot-10, burped, drooled and cleared the area where a throat usually is.

Starved for factual underpinning, the Times argued thinly that the seat was stolen. By thunder, President Obama was a nice guy, and he was a nice guy, and wasn’t he a nice guy, and we avoided talking about his eight worst scandals, sniffle, sniffle, and well, sniffle, sneeze, cough.

They had nothing.

The Times evidently was not acquainted with this piece of historical justification that the Republicans used last spring:

Not since 1888 has a Supreme Court seat vacated in a presidential election year been filled by an opposition-party-controlled Senate when the president is in the final year of his term.

Amorphous it may be, there was president precedent.  Precedent does not have to be as widely known as the name of James Garfield’s son.