Dang. Can it be THIS bad?
From Willam Rivers Pitt:
In George W. Bush’s America, being even moderately liberal these days is like being a Red Sox fan. You know what needs to happen, you know what is right, and yet some cosmic force akin to the lingering shade of Babe Ruth always manages to ascend from purgatory and batter you into dust right at the moment when something good and great is within your grasp. If you do manage to get your lineup together - home run issues, grand slam arguments, All Star players - you will get completely outspent by the damned Yankees who are sitting in your division with more money than God and the will to use it. Baseball, like politics, has no spending limits.
And then, of course, there are the umpires. In baseball they wear blue and there is no appealing their decisions, even when a call is clearly wrong. I remember with writhing specificity the 1999 ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox. A Sox player was charging for second base and Chuck Knoblauch swung a tag at him midway down the line. Knoblaugh missed the tag by a full three feet - there was a barnload of visible daylight between his glove and the Sox player - and the umpire called the Sox player out. No recourse, no appeal, and the Sox lost the series. The Yankees went on to annihilate the Atlanta Braves for their 216,339,102nd World Series title.
In George W. Bush’s America, the umpires sit in front of television cameras and work for major news networks. They look and speak like fashion models instead of journalists. They draw their paychecks from General Electric, Viacom, Disney, AOL/TimeWarner and Rupert Murdoch. There is no appealing the calls they make day after day and night after night, even when there is a barnload of visible daylight between their interpretation and the actual facts at hand. The people running this administration miss the tag with dreary regularity, and yet the media umpires seldom fail to pump their fists and yell, “You’re out!” They hide behind their masks, and all the shouting and dirt-kicking accomplishes exactly nothing.
Being a liberal is like being a Red Sox fan. Man, is that depressing.
From Willam Rivers Pitt:
In George W. Bush’s America, being even moderately liberal these days is like being a Red Sox fan. You know what needs to happen, you know what is right, and yet some cosmic force akin to the lingering shade of Babe Ruth always manages to ascend from purgatory and batter you into dust right at the moment when something good and great is within your grasp. If you do manage to get your lineup together - home run issues, grand slam arguments, All Star players - you will get completely outspent by the damned Yankees who are sitting in your division with more money than God and the will to use it. Baseball, like politics, has no spending limits.
And then, of course, there are the umpires. In baseball they wear blue and there is no appealing their decisions, even when a call is clearly wrong. I remember with writhing specificity the 1999 ALCS between the Yankees and Red Sox. A Sox player was charging for second base and Chuck Knoblauch swung a tag at him midway down the line. Knoblaugh missed the tag by a full three feet - there was a barnload of visible daylight between his glove and the Sox player - and the umpire called the Sox player out. No recourse, no appeal, and the Sox lost the series. The Yankees went on to annihilate the Atlanta Braves for their 216,339,102nd World Series title.
In George W. Bush’s America, the umpires sit in front of television cameras and work for major news networks. They look and speak like fashion models instead of journalists. They draw their paychecks from General Electric, Viacom, Disney, AOL/TimeWarner and Rupert Murdoch. There is no appealing the calls they make day after day and night after night, even when there is a barnload of visible daylight between their interpretation and the actual facts at hand. The people running this administration miss the tag with dreary regularity, and yet the media umpires seldom fail to pump their fists and yell, “You’re out!” They hide behind their masks, and all the shouting and dirt-kicking accomplishes exactly nothing.
Being a liberal is like being a Red Sox fan. Man, is that depressing.
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