Laughing Right

Following up on the thoughts in my Bruce post of yesterday, I ran accross this article on Slate arguing that the Left has grown boring and dour while the Right has all the fun. Of course, the author works from a piece that picks on The Nation – which was never exactly National Lampoon to begin with, given the difficulty of finding Stalinists with a good sense of humor – and compares it to The Weekly Standard, which isn’t even the most entertaining of right-wing screeds, not even close. Jack Shafer notes hypersensitivity as a leading cause of this humor impairment, but the fact is that postmodern, oppression-is-everywhere dogma and sackcloth-and-ashes environmentalism are the real culprits. The Left lives in terror of optimism; heck, the entire liberal establishment rests on the idea that the civil rights movement is proof positive that some things, only the federal government can accomplish – yet that same establishment would die rather than admit that any progress has been made on race relations since 1955, since that would prove that maybe the dark, sinister powerful forces don’t impose their false consciousness on everybody after all.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have a different form of dishonesty that the Left didn’t create but commonly uses to its advantage: inauthentic emotional one-upmanship. The incomparable Mark Steyn has the goods on this one in his plea to separate the genuine grief and righteous anger of September 11th from the phony, it’s-so-sad sap that surrounded the death of Princess Di. While I may rail, as I did below, against people who rip Bruce Springsteen for his emotionalism, there’s a world of difference between Bruce’s heartfelt emotion and, say, a croon from some boy band over lyrics some staff composer churned out for them, and it’s the same thing here. We can feel our own pain. Sometimes, pretending to feel someone else’s is just bunk.

NEWT FOR SENATE?

Instapundit linked earlier to this fine Michael Barone analysis of why Cynthia Mckinney lost and how it was different from the race that brought down Bob Barr. The interesting thing was his speculation at the end:
“The only possible bad news here is that McKinney has said she may run for the Senate in 2004. The seat that is up is currently held by Zell Miller, who never really wanted to be a senator anyway (he was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the unexpected death of Republican Paul Coverdell) and who turns 72 in 2004; he is widely expected to retire. Miller would obviously clobber McKinney in a primary, but she could conceivably finish first in a multicandidate primary. She would lose the runoff, of course.”
I suppose she would, but if the Georgia GOP would have one heckuva golden opportunity if she didn’t. Note Barone’s calculation that McKinney, even running against an African-American liberal Democrat, drew just 5% of the white vote in the primary. With those odds, nearly anyone’s a good bet to beat her. Know any ambitious, young, retired Georgia Republicans who might be itching for a new challenge by 2004? And boy, wouldn’t that be an entertaining campaign.

Wiley Plays The Card

One of my favorite games with internet columnists is to look at the headline of a Ralph Wiley column and try to guess (1) how far into the column until he makes a veiled reference to race and (2) how far into the column until he comes right out and starts talking about it. This one, I guessed it would be pretty early. I was actually a bit ahead of the game, but after a brief detour to bash New York, Wiley didn’t disappoint: number 7 on his list rips “Media gets some steroid phoniness by then smearing the likes of Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, but never questioning the likes of, say, Bret Boone,” to which my response is, Ralph Wiley and I are reading different media. Didn’t, like, every single article about Boone discuss how suddenly and inexplicably he had bulked up? Yeah, Rick Reilly beat a dead Moral High Horse into the ground with his assault on Sammy Sosa, and as much as I hate Bonds it’s unfair to move from the guy in the bar saying “Bonds fits the steroid profile” to the guy in the newspaper saying “I bet Barry didn’t get that way eating his Wheaties.” But really, most of the speculation I seem to see about ‘roids focuses on white guys in their mid-30s.
Then he gets to OJ . . .

Article V

You know, I touched on this in my 8/23 Atkins post below, but using a “consensus” of counting state laws to determine what is constitutionally acceptable strikes me as a flagrant violation of the spirit (to say nothing of the letter) of Article V of the Constitution, which sets out very rigorous requirements for state legislatures to amend the constitution. Make no mistake: if enough state legislatures (2/3 of them) demand a Convention for the purposes of changing the Eighth Amendment, and if enough state legislatures (3/4 of them) further ratify the resulting work of such a Convention (bearing in mind that, in modern practice, no such convention is called as long as you have enough ratifications), presto! The Constitution prohibits executing people whose names begin with the letter “M”, or whatever else those states may desire. To use an “emerging consensus” based on differing statutes passed in less than that number of states, and on the basis of statutes that were not debated with the gravity of a (generally permanent) constitutional amendment, is a direct attack on the Article V procedures.

First Amendment Exclusionary Rules

Apparently the California courts are looking into whether you have a First Amendment right to link to websites that facilitate the theft of intellectual property, and the business community is in an uproar. This subject fascinates me, although I haven’t dealt with it much in practice; I did my third year law school paper on “First Amendment Exclusionary Rules,” and they come up all the time. We have lots of rules (going back to common law causes of action for fraud and defamation) that impose restrictions on speech that is demonstrably false. But there are also a lot of areas of the law, nearly all of them fraught with uncertainty, that govern restrictions on truthful speech that conveys information that was obtained through some sort of illegality, from trade secret law to military intelligence to inside information about stocks. Our speech is not so free as we pretend, and in many cases there are good reasons why.

Arab Military Culture

I’ve lately been reading David Pryce-Jones’ “The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs.” It’s a deeply depressing book. This two-part article (NRO linked to it a few days ago) is chock full of anecdotes and analysis along a similar line, explaining why the culture of Arab countries is such an obstacle to effective action by complex organizations or effective use of modern technology – in this case, in the military. The whole article is worth reading; a priceless quote:
“On one occasion, an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt at long last received the operators� manuals that had laboriously been translated into Arabic. The American trainers took the newly minted manuals straight to the tank park and distributed them to the tank crews. Right behind them, the company commander, a graduate of the armor school at Fort Knox and specialized courses at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance school, promptly collected the manuals from those crews. Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point in giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In point of fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent source of knowledge. Being the only person who could explain the fire control instrumentation or bore sight artillery weapons brought prestige and attention.”
And one more:
“Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that within two weeks of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war, his minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his immediate staff of the order. Should a war, Sadat wondered, be kept secret from the very people expected to fight it?”
The $64 million question, of course – one that Pryce-Jones seems to answer in the negative in his book but in the affirmative in his National Review columns – is whether this culture will change when and if the Arab countries are reconstituted politically to provide for a democratic process of peaceful sharing of power (the European model) or peaceful transfers of power (the American model). Frankly, I don’t know enough about the region to really answer that one.

Rapping Against Wellstone

Here’s a bizarre story from the American Prospect about Citizens Opposed to Racism and Discrimination (CORAD), a conservative group in Minnesota that’s running ads against Paul Wellstone and put out a rap CD (!) full of what can only be described as right-wing propaganda in an effort to break the Democrats’ hammerlock on African-American voters in the Twin Cities. TAP’s problem is that it can’t seem to decide whether or not CORAD is actually accomplishing enough to be newsworthy.

DISSING THE BOSS

It’s always been easy for people who fancy themselves to be cool and sophisticated to bash Bruce Springsteen. Bruce’s work has always been highly emotional, and his appeal visceral, with none of the too-cool-for-school detatchment that is the signature of rock poseurs everywhere. That’s what made him such a man of the moment in the flag-waving 80s and such an easy target in the Seinfeldy, irony-ridden 90s. And, contrary to what some people seem to think, the unguarded sincerity of Bruce’s music is precisely what makes him once again a vital force in the post-September 11 world, the world where even David Letterman got choked up on national television.

Continue reading DISSING THE BOSS

The Players League Rides Again

A couple of investment managers want to bring back the Players League. As they acknowledge, there are logistical problems:
“Some details would have to be worked out, of course. TV and concession profits would have to be diverted to charities correctly. Players’ expenses would need to be covered, and an escrow account could be set up to liberally compensate them for any injuries. Maintenance could be continued, so stadiums wouldn’t deteriorate.”
This dramatically understates the problem; finding stadiums was hard enough in 1890, when the major leagues played in parks that would embarrass a modern college team, but the infrastructure required today to play major league quality baseball doesn’t spring up overnight. Do you think that any park controlled by pro sports owners would be willing to rent to strikers? This is as unrealistic as the perennial call for a fan strike (which if you think about it, is as meaningful a punishment for striking as using the death penalty on suicide bombers – if you don’t play the games, we won’t watch them!!!)

Baseball Mom

Baseball, the sages tell us, is a game for fathers and sons. From games of catch and Little League coaches all the way to the big league world of Alomars and Ripkens and Bondses and Griffeys, we often think of how the game ties together generations of men. All of this is true, of course; hey, I got choked up at the end of “Field of Dreams” the first time I saw it, too.
But let’s not overlook one of the best gifts a boy can have growing up as a baseball fan: the Baseball Mom.

Continue reading Baseball Mom

Atkins Away

It’s easy to make fun of the Supreme Court for relying on such ephemera as public opinion polls and “international opinion” in construing the Constitution – recall that when the Constitution was written, “international opinion” (which then, as now, meant “Europe”) was very, very much against democracy and the separation of powers, while barely a decade later the Continent was awash in the bloody tide of the guillotine – but what to do about it? Well, to stop this type of thing in its tracks, Congress could pass a statute simply stating that no court shall consider certain things in construing the meaning of the Constitution or federal statutes – such things to at least include public opinion polls or any “consensus” from outside our borders or that depends on, say, legislative enactments in a smaller number of the States than is required to amend the Constitution’s text in Article V. (You’d have to draw the thing more carefully than I’m doing now, but you get the idea).
Of course, the Atkins decision itself may likewise be easy to evade, since in at least some circumstances it appears to give state legislatures the wiggle room either to define who is “retarded” or easier yet to turn the question over to juries, who might yet be able to find that the nature of the crime (including what the Federal Sentencing Guidelines refer to as “more than minimal planning”) is evidence that the perp is not retarded. Since the Court has already held for some time that juries must consider retardation as a mitigating factor at sentencing, this is not a real sea change. In addition, because the sole focus is on the “mentally retarded criminal,” the decision does not appear to bar executing people like Rickey Ray Rector, the guy Clinton fried during the 1992 campaign, because Rector was not retarded at the time of the crime (he apparently lost a lot of brain when he shot himself in the head following the crime).

Beltre

It’s official, as Bill Simmons would say: Adrian Beltre has made The Leap. Here’s his line since his breakout game July 26 against the Giants:

G AB H 2B 3B HR R RBI BB K SB Avg Slg OBP
24 94 35 7 2 5 18 20 6 14 4 .372 .649 .410

(Yes, I’m one of those old-fashioned types who puts slugging average ahead of OBP). For a supremely talented player who snoozed through the first half of the season, that’s something to write home about, and it’s a huge reason the Dodgers are pulling away in the NL wild card race.
(UPDATE: As you can tell, I’m going to have some trouble figuring out how to do stat lines on the Blogger software. Bear with me!)
UPDATE after moving to MT: Finally learned the code to fix all the stat tables!

Here We Go

It’s The Baseball Crank’s blog! Will it work? I’m not making any promises about the regularity of content at this site, but this medium is too good to pass up. Some of you may know my work from Bill Simmons’ “Boston Sports Guy” website, where I got my start as an internet pundit on things baseball, or from my allegedly weekly column (barely monthly, these days) at the Providence Journal’s website (which, sadly, is now registration-only, although it’s still free). Some may also know me from the Baseball Primer website, where I participate in posts every once and a while and where my article on the simple solution to baseball’s competitive balance issues appeared. If I can find the time, I’m hoping to make this site a place for posting those of my short thoughts on baseball, politics and anything else that I deem web-worthy. Thanks for stopping by.