History

Why Is Banning The Teaching Of Critical Race Theory In Schools Ethically Justifiable When Banning The Teaching Of Evolution Is Not?

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Critical Race ban

On this, the 96th anniversary of the beginning of the Scopes Trial in 1925, let’s consider attorney Clarence Darrow’s opening statement. Here is the crux of it:

“…Along comes somebody who says ‘we have got to believe it as I believe it. It is a crime to know more than I know.’ And they publish a law to inhibit learning. This law says that it shall be a criminal offense to teach in the public schools any account of the origin of man that is in conflict with the divine account in the Bible. It makes the Bible the yardstick to measure every man’s intellect, to measure every man’s intelligence and to measure every man’s learning. Are your mathematics good? Turn to Elijah 1:2. Is your philosophy good? See II Samuel 3. Is your astronomy good? See Genesis 2:7. Is your chemistry good? See – well, chemistry, see Deuteronomy 3:6, or anything that tells about brimstone. Every bit of knowledge that the mind has must be submitted to a religious test. It is a travesty upon language, it is a travesty upon justice, it is a travesty upon the constitution to say that any citizen of Tennessee can be deprived of his rights by a legislative body in the face of the constitution.

“Of course, I used to hear when I was a boy you could lead a horse to water, but you could not make him drink water. I could lead a man to water, but I could not make him drink, either. And you can close your eyes and you won’t see, cannot see, refuse to open your eyes – stick your fingers in your ears and you cannot hear – if you want to. But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends after all upon the tolerance and forbearance of his fellow man. If men are not tolerant, if men cannot respect each other’s opinions, if men cannot live and let live, then no man’s life is safe, no man’s life is safe.

“Here is a country made up of Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotch, German, Europeans, Asiatics, Africans, men of every sort and men of every creed and men of every scientific belief. Who is going to begin this sorting out and say, “I shall measure you; I know you are a fool, or worse; I know and I have read a creed telling what I know and I will make people go to Heaven even if they don’t want to go with me. I will make them do it.” Where is the man that is wise enough to do this?

“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private school, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it from the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always they are feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until, with flying banners and beating drums, we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted torches to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.“

As mentioned in the post earlier today, the issue of whether a state could ban the teaching of evolution was never settled in Scopes, but many years later in the Supreme Court case of Epperson v. Arkansas (1968), which struck down a state law that criminalized the teaching of evolution in public schools. Epperson, however, was narrowly decided on the basis that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits a state from requiring, in the words of the majority opinion, “that teaching and learning must be tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect or dogma.” It was not based on freedom of speech, or as Darrow termed it, “freedom of thought.” The Theory of Evolution and “Critical Race Theory” are both theories, though one is based in scientific research and the other is a product of scholarly analysis. Though the latter seems to carry the heft of religious faith in some quarters, freedom of religion is not the issue where banning critical race theory is involved. Nor, realistically speaking, is freedom of speech as Darrow describes it.

School districts, which are agents of the government, have a recognized right to oversee the content of what is taught in the public schools, within reason, and when the purpose is defensible. Teachers are not free to teach whatever they choose, though their controversial choices cannot be made criminal, just grounds for dismissal. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals made this clear in Evans-Marshall v. Bd of Ed of Tipp City Exempted Village Sch Dist. (6th Cir. 2010), a case involving a high school English teacher who was fired for using classroom assignments and materials without following the appropriate steps for approval. The court stated, “Even to the extent academic freedom, as a constitutional rule, could somehow apply to primary and secondary schools, that does not insulate a teacher’s curricular and pedagogical choices from the school board’s oversight.”

School districts still can’t define a curriculum so narrowly that it violates students’ constitutional rights. In Board of Island Trees v. Pico (U.S. 1982), the U.S. Supreme Court held that the school district could not remove books from the school library without a legitimate pedagogical reason, because doing so violated students’ free speech rights of access to information.  Districts and schools are also limited to what they can require children to study, though most cases in this realm again involve religion. However, once school districts and schools have defined a legally permissible curriculum, courts will give them broad discretion to implement it even over community and parental objections. For example:

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Saturday Morning Ethics Warm-Up, July 10, 2021: Remembering The Unethical And Bizarre”Monkey Trial”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Scopes

Ooooh, it’s Clarence Darrow time again, and as I will show in another post shortly, this has serious, and underappreciated current day relevance.

For on this date in Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial began in 1925, not only one of the most famous trials in U.S. history, but also one of the most misrepresented, misunderstood and, frankly, silly trials as well. John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, was accused of teaching evolution in violation of a new Tennessee state law which made it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to “teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” Town officials persuaded Scopes to volunteer to get arrested for the offense, not so much to challenge the law but because alocal businessman figured out that it would put Dayton on the map. His plot succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The American Civil Liberties Unio—-yes, they once cared about the First Amendment—announced it would defend Scopes, and hired an aging but famous Clarence Darrow to do the job, which included making sure his client was convicted, so they could appeal the verdict to the U.S. Supreme Court, where even a monkey judge would know that the Tennessee anti-evolution law was a blatant First Amendment violation.

William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate who was seeking his fourth shot at the White House, volunteered to assist the prosecution in his guise as a fundamentalist Everyman. The Monkey Trial got underway with in-person coverage by renowned cynic H.L. Mencken and hoards of other reporters. Parts of the trial were broadcast nationally over the radio, an all-time first. Preachers set up revival tents along the city’s main street; venders sold Bibles, hot dogs and souvenirs like monkey dolls and fans to tourists. A carnival “exhibit” featuring two chimpanzees and a “missing link” opened in town: the alleged “Monkey Man” was 51-year-old Jo Viens, who was short, had a receding forehead, and whose jaw protruded like an ape. One of the chimpanzees wore a plaid suit, a brown fedora, and white spats, and periodically was allowed to run around on the courthouse lawn.

To recap, the “trial” was based on a contrived “crime” committed with the cooperation of authorities, and the defense was to make sure Scopes was convicted, not acquitted. But things got even more Bizarro World-like. At one point, Scopes told Darrow that a substitute teacher, not him, had actually taught the Darwin class, and Darrow told the teacher to shut the hell up about that rather crucial detail. When Judge John Raulston ruled that expert scientific testimony on evolution would be inadmissible, Darrow decided that his sole expert witness would be Bryan, one of the prosecutors. (No, this had never happened before and has never happened since.). Raulston ordered the trial moved to the courthouse lawn for this spectacle, fearing that the weight of the spectators and reporters inside would cause the courthouse floor to collapse.

Darrow treated Bryan as a hostile witness, though they knew each other, were both political progressives, and were both doing what they loved best, performing in front of a crowd. Popular legend holds that Darrow made a monkey out of Bryan, which was how the famous play (“Inherit the Wind”) based on the trial and its many TV and movie versions portrayed the showdown, but reading the transcript tells a different story. Bryan’s answers were cagey and clever, but he had a big problem: he knew his answers were being broadcast to potential voters who were not fundamentalists, yet he couldn’t afford to alienate the Bible-Beating jury. Darrow had no such dilemma: remember, he wanted to alienate the jury, and knew that if Bryan insisted that the Bible was literally true, “The Great Commoner” would end his political career (though it was almost certainly over anyway.) . Thus Bryan argued, for example, that God explained things in the Bible in ways that could be understood by the people of the time. For example, God obviously knew that the Earth moved around the sun, and not the other way around, but HE just said, in the Bible, that the sun “stopped,” so as not to confuse the faithful.

The weirdness got worse: in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. I’m pretty sure this is an abuse of process and wildly unethical: isn’t a request to be found guilty indistinguishable from a guilty plea? This tactic did have a mean consequence for poor Bryan: under Tennessee law, the admission of guilt meant Bryan couldn’t deliver the grand closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. It took eight minutes for the jury to return with a guilty verdict—why did Darrow feel he had to ask for a verdict that was pre-ordained, other than to deny Bryan his big finale?— and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed.

After all of this, the ACLU’s scheme still failed: the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Scopes verdict, but on a procedural technicality, so the case never got to the U.S. Supreme Court at all. The constitutional issue was officially unresolved until SCOTUS overturned a similar Arkansas law.

Can you guess why this fiasco has special relevance in 2021?

Watch this space!

A “Bias Makes Professionals Stupid And Unprofessional” Update

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Trump photo defaced

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the 2016 Post Election Ethics Train Wreck and the resulting mass effort to bring down Donald Trump was the corruption of virtually all of our society’s professions, and the vast majority of their members. Educators, psychiatrists, teachers, judges— journalists, of course, though they were already pretty far gone; broadcasters, of course. Entertainment professionals and performers, heaven knows (That’s the Dixie Chicks and their clever and subtle political commentary above.) In addition to theater professionals, two more of my professions have disgraced themselves: lawyers and ethicists. The listserv of a legal ethics organization I belong to was virtually cackling with joy over Rudy Giuliani’s partisan and dangerous interim suspension in New York, while the same group has been notably unenthusiastic about criticizing out-of court hyperbole by anti-Trump lawyers like the recently sentenced Michael Avenatti. (I may have missed some more balanced attention because I dropped out of the group for about 18 months in disgust over its bias.) Here is a tweet by a conservative attorney that was just offered to the group for comment on whether it raised issues of professional misconduct:

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Verdict: Feminists And Lesbians Need To Find Better Role Models And Heroes

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Violette Morris

“On This Day She” is a book published this year dedicated to “the women whom [sic] time has forgotten; those who didn’t make it into the history books and those whom [sic] society failed to uphold as significant figures in their own right.” There is also a website following through on the premise of the book (and promoting it), from whence the misleading tweet above emanated. Though the book does admit to including women who engaged in “the bad” and who it deems unjustly ignored by history, the tweet above undercuts that admission. The hint is in the last sentence. Why was Morris killed by the French Resistance in 1944?

She was a Nazi, that’s why, and a traitor as well. Morris, a French citizen, sourced black-market petrol for the Nazis, ran a garage for the Luftwaffe, and drove for the Nazi and Vichy hierarchy. After Germany took over France, she worked to foil the operations of the Special Operations Executive, an English organization that aided the Resistance. Claims that she also engaged in spying activities and Nazi torture are disputed, but never mind: what she did do was sufficient to have her known as “The Hyena of the Gestapo” and sentenced to death in absentia. She was ultimately shot and killed—assassinated, to be technical— when her car was ambushed by the Resistance.

Good.

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Afternoon Ethics Clean-up, 7/5/2021: July Fifth Weirdness And “Justice”

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

Celebrating July 5th as a federal holiday is affirmatively strange, because not much good happened on this date. Ted Williams died on July 5, 2002, for example. In 1852, Frederick Douglass picked this date to give his “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” anti-America speech to the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, laying the groundwork for anti-America movements in the black community ever since. On this date in 1921, baseball began unraveling the worst scandal in U.S. professional sports, as it concluded that the 1919 World Series had been fixed by gamblers bribing the key players on the Chicago White Sox, aka “The Black Sox.” It was also the date, in 1865, that a military tribunal convicted David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Payne, Mary Surratt, Michael O’Laughlin, Edward Spangler, Samuel Arnold and Dr. Samuel Mudd of “maliciously, unlawfully, and traitorously” conspiring with John Wilkes Booth and others to assassinate President Lincoln on April 14, 1865, and planning to kill General Grant, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward. It was one of the most unfair trials in U.S. history, despite the fact that all of the alleged conspirators were probably guilty. Herold, Atzerodt, Payne, and Surratt were executed [above].

In short, it’s not a good date for ethics.

So far…

1 Ethics Alarms has a new Ethics Villain to keep tabs on. David Cole, the ACLU Legal Director who made an ass of himself and attacked his organization’s own client by criticizing a SCOTUS decision that followed the ACLU’s position, was the main authority in a New York Times review of the Court’s just completed term. Here’s nice Cole quote: “The new court is definitely conservative, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily hostile to civil liberties. It protected many liberties that conservatives favor, including religious liberty, property rights, free speech, the privacy of the home and the right of the wealthy to donate to charities anonymously.”

No partisan bias there! Wait, David, just what are the rights that the progressive justices protect?

2. Speaking of SCOTUS, Steve-O-in NJ asked for my opinion of this idiotic essay in The Week: “The case for ending judicial review.” It reminded me that I never finished the Ethics Alarms compendium of fake news categories, of which this is one: Fantasy Controversies. This kind of essay might as well be “The case for eliminating sex,” “The case for using flatulence to fly to the moon” or “The case for a cheese-based economy.” There is no way for Congress to stop the Court from overruling laws—Separation of Powers exemplified— it finds unconstitutional short of a Constitutional amendment, which is fantasy itself. At the end of the essay, the author concludes, ‘Well, maybe it’s not such a good idea after all.’

It is unethical to waste readers’ time.

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The Comment Of The Day Trifecta Continues, With P.M. Lawrence’s Further Observations On Custer’s Clash With J.E.B. Stuart in “July 3: Pickett’s Charge, Custer’s First Stand, Ethics And Leadership”…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Ethics Alarms has readers all over the globe and several regular non-American commenters as well. Their perceptions are always interesting and sometimes enlightening in ways the USA-steeped commentariat here would be challenged to duplicate. P.M. Lawrence is one of our esteemed foreign correspondents, and in this Comment of the Day on my post on the epic events of July 3, 1863 in a little shoe-making town in Pennsylvania…

As I mentioned in comments to earlier posts on this topic at this site, it is entirely possible that Lee planned Pickett’s Charge to work in conjunction with the attack on the rear. This follows from precedents in military history, of which Lee would have been well aware from his experience as an instructor. In particular, Gettysburg was an “encounter battle”, brought about by a less than planned encounter; when that happens, the major risk is that whoever withdraws first suffers a terrible pursuit of the sort Napoleon showed the world – so both try to fight it out, following the logic of game theory’s “prisoner’s dilemma”, “tragedy of the commons”, or “money auction”. (At least Lee was able to fight long and hard enough to thwart that worst possible outcome, and he may well have known that and been trying for that at the time, at least once victory was unlikely.)

Back to the precedents: Lee may well have modeled his tactics (not strategy) on Oudenarde, which was also an encounter battle; when that started, Marlborough realised his predicament early on and detached a Dutch flying column to march around the fighting to attack the French reinforcements in flank hours later, before those could reach and feed the fight that Marlborough was also feeding all along (in Grant’s phrase), a feeding which Marlborough had to do to keep everything in play until the Dutch blow fell.

However, to the best of my knowledge Lee never claimed later that he had been trying to do this, even though the similarities to precedents are striking.

By the way, U.S. culture has so changed its concepts and terminology that “honor” does not mean what honour now means in British English or other European languages, or what it meant in the U.S.A. of that era. I would venture to suggest that U.S.A.-ians do not now have access to this concept at all, what with language now steering them to a different concept entirely. Think how you could now access the old meaning of “gay”, if you even wished to. It’s the sort of thing Orwell brought out in “1984”. (Hint: police lying to suspects is not honourable – and anyone who argues otherwise is invoking different concepts, which is the point I am trying to highlight.)

Also by the way, it is an old precept that “the secret of military discipline is that the soldiers should be more scared of the sergeants than of the enemy”, which may have been at work here. It may be found in the writings of Montaigne and of Frederick the Great, with “officers” substituting for “sergeants” (the term “officers” also covers N.C.O.s in many continental European languages).

Comment Of The Day: “Independence Day Ethics Fireworks, July 4th, 2021: ‘The Stars And Stripes Forever,’ And Other Matters”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Happy Birthday, America

This Comment of the Day on today’s Fourth of July post, by Steve-O-in NJ, needs no introduction. Neither does he, as the Ethics Alarms leader in Comments of the Day with more than 30 before this one.

Today we celebrate the birthday of the United States, well, some of us do, anyway.

Some say that today means nothing, because the actions of men more than two centuries ago do not match up with the opinions of people not even two years ago. Others say that today never meant a thing, because this nation is a bad nation that’s just happened to get it right once or twice. Thank God this generation is finally getting it right, and we’re finally moving past the past 245 years, they say. We can’t go back and change the results of the elections in 2016, 2000, and 1980, we can’t go back and convince Teddy Roosevelt not to run in 1912, we can’t go back and stop Congress from declaring war on Spain in 1898, we can’t go back and prevent the Civil War, and we can’t go back and convince the Founding Fathers to abolish slavery right out of the gate in 1787, they say. We can’t go back and make cooler heads prevail in 1775, or stop the arrival of slaves in 1619, or make Columbus turn back, they say. However, we the people of today can break with all of that, and move forward with a new nation, unfettered by that past. None of it means a thing. It’s tainted.

I seem to remember a man born Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot, saying it was now Year Zero and everything before was nullified. You can look up what happened there. I also seem to remember a man born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later called Lenin, saying everything that came before was tainted and needed to be erased. You can look up what happened there too. Before that a revolutionary parliament that included such luminaries as Maximilien Robespierre declared it to be Year One of a new age, with the months of the year renamed completely and weeks of seven days replaced by weeks of ten. You can also look up what happened there.

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July 3: Pickett’s Charge, Custer’s First Stand, Ethics And Leadership

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Picketts-Charge--330-to-345-pm-landscape

[I started to write a new post and while doing my research discovered that I would basically be repeating what I posted last year. Thus I am re-posting that July 3 Gettysburg essay as well as the one I attached to it, but with several substantive additions.]

July 3  was the final day of the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg in 1863, reaching its bloody climax in General Robert E. Lee’s desperate  gamble on a massed assault on the Union center. In history it has come to be known as Pickett’s Charge, after the leader of the Division that was slaughtered during it.

At about 2:00 pm this day in 1863, near the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg,  Lee launched his audacious stratagem to pull victory from the jaws of defeat in the pivotal battle of the American Civil War.  The Napoleonic assault on the entrenched Union position on Cemetery Ridge, with a “copse of trees” at its center, was the only such attack in the entire war, a march into artillery and rifle fire across an open field and over fences. When my father, the old soldier, saw the battlefield  for the first time in his eighties, he became visibly upset because, he said, he could visualize the killing field. He was astounded that Lee would order such a reckless assault.

The battle lasted less than an hour. Union forces suffered 1,500 casualties,, while at least 1,123 Confederates were killed on the battlefield, 4,019 were wounded, and nearly 4000 Rebel soldiers were captured. Pickett’s Charge would go down in history as one of the worst military blunders of all time.

At Ethics Alarms, it stands for several ethics-related  concepts. One is moral luck: although Pickett’s Charge has long been regarded by historians and scholars as a disastrous mistake by Lee, and in retrospect seems like a rash decision, it could have succeeded if the vicissitudes of chance had broken the Confederacy’s way.  Then the maneuver would be cited today as another example of Lee’s brilliance, in whatever remained of the United States of America, if indeed it did remain. This is the essence of moral luck; unpredictable factors completely beyond the control of an individual or other agency determine whether a decision or action are wise or foolish, ethical or unethical.

Pickett’s Charge has been discussed on Ethics Alarms as a vivid example, perhaps the best, of how successful leaders and others become so used to discounting the opinions and criticism of others that they lose the ability to accept the possibility that they can be wrong. This delusion is related to #14 on the Rationalizations list,  Self-validating Virtue. We see the trap in many professions and contexts, and its victims have been among some of America’s greatest. Those who succeed by being bold and seeing possibilities lesser peers cannot perceive often lose respect and regard for anyone’s authority or opinion but their own.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 7/2/2021: Remembering The Epic Second Day Of The Battle Of Gettysburg

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Little Round Top

On July 2, 1863, during the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg with the fate of the Union and the United States hanging in the balance, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia tried to break through the line of General George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac at Cemetery Ridge, Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top. More than once that day, only luck and chaos prevented July 2 from marking the end of the nation as we know it, and from preserving slavery at least a little longer.

All accounts of the battle on July 2 are full of the word “confusion.” Robert E. Lee ordered Lieutenant General James Longstreet to attack by moving his troops up the Federal left flank while General A.P. Hill’s corps threatened the center of the Union line. If coordinated properly, General George Gordon Meade wouldn’t be able to move his troops to reinforce the Union left, where Lee instructed Lieutenant General Richard S. Ewell to make diversionary attacks and launch an all-out assault if possible. Lee’s plan, if successful, would force the Union army to surrender the positions it held on the high ground south of Gettysburg after the first day of the battle, and the entire Civil War might have been won by the South in a day.

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Noonish Ethics Battles, 7/1/2021: “Remember Gettysburg” Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Gettysburg

July 1 marks the first day of the epic Battle of Gettysburg, which could fairly be celebrated as the beginning of the end for the Confederacy and slavery. Like so many pivotal moments in our history, this one came about by random chance, with Lee’s army and the newly installed Gen. Meade’s Army of the Potomac stumbling into each other in a Pennsylvania country town in 1863. For three days, a bloody and complicated battle engulfed the area, with so many ethics lessons in the process that I fear I won’t be able to cover all of them this week. [ Guest posts on the topic will be welcome!] I am hoping to visit the battlefield again this year—this week will be tough, unfortunately. I will definitely find time this week to watch Ted Turner’s excellent and even-handed film about the battle, highlighted for me by the performances of Jeff Daniels as Joshua Chamberlain, Tom Berrenger as Longstreet, and the late Richard Jordan as General Lewis Armistead, as well as the dramatization of Picket’s Charge, and the score by Randy Edelman.

1. Baseball sexual misconduct notes…A restraining order was taken out against Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer, last year’s National League Cy Young winner. Bauer is a sportswriter favorite for his outspoken social media presence and progressive politics, so this will be a blow to the sportswriting woke. The woman making the allegations had what started as a consensual relationship with the pitcher, but in a 67-page document, alleges that Bauer assaulted her on two different occasions, punching her in the face, vagina, and buttocks, sticking his fingers down her throat, and strangling her to the point where she lost consciousness twice, an experience she said she did not consent to. After the second choking episode, the woman awoke to find Bauer punching her in the head and face, inflicting serious injuries. She contacted police, and there is now an active investigation of Bauer by the Pasadena, California police department. If any of her account is true, Bauer faces serious discipline from baseball, which has been (finally) cracking down on domestic abuse by players in recent years.

Also yesterday, MLB suspended the former New York Mets general manager Jared Porter at least the end of the 2022 season.   Porter was fired from the Mets in January after an ESPN investigation revealed that he had harassed a female reporter in 2016 when he worked for the Cubs.

Craig Calcaterra, the lawyer sports pundit, supplied the facts here, and I am grateful for that. I would love to subscribe to his substack newsletter, but every issue I read includes Craig’s apparently incurable progressive bias where it doesn’t belong, and I’m just not paying for that. This time, for example, he cites the Bauer, Porter, and Bill Cosby stories to justify the proposition that “we believe [women] when they say what happened to them,” a stunning thing for a lawyer to say. How Kirsten Gillibrand of him! Later, as if this belongs in a baseball news letter, Craig cheers the death of Donald Rumsfeld as an architect of an “Illegal and immoral” war.

All war is immoral to some extent, but the Iraq War, while in hindsight a mistake, was not illegal except in left-wing talking points. Craig should know better, and maybe he does, but in any event, foreign policy and international law are not his areas of expertise. The degree to which wokism has rotted his brain also shows up in his inclusion of an insulting trigger warning before his account of the Bauer allegations: “Warning: the following contains allegations of sexual assault and violence that may be difficult to read.” Oh for heaven’s sake: “Finnegan’s Wake” is difficult to read. News is life: stop treating adults like children.

You can subscribe to Craig’s excellent baseball observations and juvenile political commentary here.

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