For a moment there, we almost believed it: Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's radical solution for the ongoing fiscal cliff nightmare, and maybe politics entirely, was going to work. Scrawling a vaguely political message on paper cups containing overpriced coffee would deliver us from partisan politics, from disagreement itself. We were going to Come Together™ while consuming a Trenta vanilla soy half-caf latte with extra chocolate drizzle.

Today's a different story. As baristas declined to partake and customers complained, the downfall of Schultz's utopian, cup-littered dream continued this morning when the hyperlocal Patch network, which produced significant scoops while covering the Newtown shootings, issued an incredibly strange and possibly unethical memo: the AOL brand intends to "partner" with Starbucks by... sending individual cups, decorated with unspecified "opinions", to Washington, D.C., where "lawmakers" will somehow read them and stop fighting. Here's more on the program, via Jim Romenesko:

We expect this to be the first in a series of Patch and Starbucks initiatives giving consumers the opportunity to write messages and create drawings on Starbucks cups to express their opinions on significant topics facing our country. We will then send the cups to Washington so that lawmakers can understand how people in communities across the country feel about these issues, and to initiate action.

The same day, politically-inclined Starbucks customers began complaining on Twitter that their local barista forgot to write Come Together™ on their Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino®. Via New York:

#Starbucks Fail - There's no "come together" message on my 10am coffee in Wash DC (Glover Park). C'mon Man! twitter.com/ROSSatACA/stat…

— Ross Lieberman (@ROSSatACA) December 27, 2012

Utterly barbaric. Here's the Times's Brian Stelter:

My suburban MD Starbucks isn't writing "come together" on all its cups. Its only on this one, for display purposes: instagr.am/p/Tv2cHAMd15/

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) December 27, 2012

It is difficult, by the way, to find anyone, AT ALL, who takes the Starbucks campaign even kind of seriously:

If your Starbucks drink says "come together" on it, that's an invitation to negotiate your own price for it.

— David Waldman (@KagroX) December 27, 2012

Disaster: The Starbucks on Farragut Square isn't writing "Come Together" on its cups. We're going over.

— Neil King (@NKingofDC) December 27, 2012

Starbucks putting "Come Together" on DC-area cups as message to pols. What would #mapoliStarbucks message be? "Shred the evidence?"

— David S. Bernstein (@dbernstein) December 27, 2012

And some are even crying foul:

For the UK tax payer, this #Starbucks "come together" memo on US econ is beyond hilarious.#Taxavoidance bit.ly/W3GcpW

— Claire Bolderson (@ClaireBolderson) December 27, 2012

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J.K. Trotter