Dan Drezner has a post on the connections between sports and political affiliations. I don’t really buy it, but it’s interesting reading. Maureen Dowd uses a Cubs lede to a typically incoherent column. And Jonah Goldberg rips on something I’d meant to get to: the ridiculous New York Times editorial (No longer web-accessible) effectively rooting for the Red Sox, which is practically a parody of the old line about a liberal being a man too fair-minded to take his own side in an argument. Leaving aside the Times’ bias (i.e., the fact that the paper part owns the Red Sox), the sentiment is wholly one of, shall we say, guilt at siding with the winners.
It’s not that I object to New Yorkers rooting for the Sox; like most Mets fans I know, I’m pulling for them mostly out of hatred for the Yankees. And I wouldn’t object to the same sentiment from an out-of-town paper; I was pulling for the Cubs, after all. It’s that the Times is supposed to be one of the Yankees’ home town papers, and has certainly never been exclusively a paper of Mets partisans. But the Times won’t take the side of its own readers.