I have now seen various versions of this question on multiple blogs, websites, and in comments around the web—this is the version from “The Last Refuge,” a conservative site:

“How did Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann spend 2 years investigating Trump-Russia; with a team of 19 lawyers, $40 million in resources, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and 500 witnesses; and not find out that Hillary Clinton created the hoax they were investigating?”

It was confirmation bias. It’s really as simple as that. Even though the lawyers and agents involved in the investigation could not find the smoking gun evidence they were sure was there somewhere showing that Donald Trump and his odious minions conspired with America’s enemies to steal the 2016 election from its rightful winner, Hillary Clinton, they were absolutely certain that’s what happened, and still probably believe that’s what happened. They believed it fervently before the investigation ever began, and it poisoned the objectivity and the legitimacy of their work throughout.

Every aspect of Trump’s Presidency was poisoned by confirmation bias—from the news media, from academics, from the Washington D.C. culture, from the popular culture—stretching back before he was nominated. He was a bad guy, that’s all, and everything he did or said was filtered through that jaundiced perception. It is impossible for anyone to succeed in any job, and definitely not the hardest job in the civilized world, burdened with that handicap.

Continue reading →

You want violence instead of civil discourse? In 1856, you got it when on this date, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks beat Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner in the Senate over the expansion of slavery and Sumner’s speech excoriating slavery-supporting Senators by name. Brooks entered the Senate chamber and used his cane to beat Sumner, who was sitting at his desk. Sumner’s legs were pinned under the desk, which was bolted to the floor, so he could not escape. If Brooks had not been pulled away, Sumner might have been killed. But the attacker became an instant hero in the South, as supporters sent him commemorative canes. Sumner could not return to the Senate for three years because of his injuries.

Nice. And it appears to me that there are a lot of cultural exhortations to violence occurring right now. Democrats are actively fear-mongering about an imaginary “threat to democracy” posed by Republicans, even as Democrats push for restrictions on free speech and continue with their partisan show trials over the Capitol riot. Violence in response to any police shooting involving a black citizen is now routine, and abortion activists are threatening violence in response to the looming Roe reversal. Meanwhile, the media is assisting in the despicable effort to pin the Buffalo shooting on Tucker Carlson and Fox News

Always happy to help out, the Mad Men (and women) have recently decided that killing the people who you don’t like or disagree with is acceptable and hilarious. In this Amazon Prime TV ad, we’re supposed to applaud a man being killed because he tries to flirt with a woman at a party:

In this one, Apple shows a young woman, the commercial’s protagonist, vaporizing the people who threaten her privacy:

The message is that it’s justifiable to employ violence to get rid of bad people. This is called “playing with fire.”

Continue reading →

New Yorker essayist Roger Angell has died at 101, and what a writer he was! Baseball was one of his special passions, and I seldom missed any of his perfect gems of sports reporting and philosophy. My favorite, as you might guess, was his account of the famous Game Six of the 1975 World Series between the Red Sox and the Reds—the game where Carlton Fisk waved his winning home run fair in a TV sequence that changed how they broadcast baseball. I was there that night with my father, thanks to the good luck of having two law school classmates who were sons of the Cincinnati Reds president. The experience remains one of the top two or three joyful moments of my life.

In tribute to Angell, here is his November 1975 account of that game, “Agincourt and After,” expressing perfectly at the end an aspect of the ethical value of caring that is too often overlooked:

The Sox, it will be recalled, nearly won it right away, when they loaded the bases in the ninth with none out, but an ill-advised dash home by Denny Doyle after a fly, and a cool, perfect peg to the plate by George Foster, snipped the chance. The balance of the game now swung back, as it so often does when opportunities are wasted. Drago pitched out of a jam in the tenth, but he flicked Pete Rose’s uniform with a pitch to start the eleventh. Griffey bunted, and Fisk snatched up the ball and, risking all, fired to second for the force on Rose. Morgan was next, and I had very little hope left. He struck a drive on a quick, deadly rising line – you could still hear the loud whock! in the stands as the white blur went out over the infield – and for a moment I thought the ball would land ten or fifteen rows back in the right-field bleachers.

 

But it wasn’t hit quite that hard – it was traveling too fast, and there was no sail to it – and Dwight Evans, sprinting backward and watching the flight of it over his shoulder, made a last-second, half-staggering turn to his left, almost facing away from the plate at the end, and pulled the ball in over his head at the fence. The great catch made for two outs in the end, for Griffey had never stopped running and was easily doubled off first.

 

And so the swing of things was won back again. Carlton Fisk, leading off the bottom of the twelfth against Pat Darcy, the eighth Reds pitcher of the night – it was well into morning now, in fact – socked the second pitch up and out, farther and farther into the darkness above the lights, and when it came down at last, reilluminated, it struck the topmost, innermost edge of the screen inside the yellow left-field foul pole and glanced sharply down and bounced on the grass: a fair ball, fair all the way. I was watching the ball, of course, so I missed what everyone on television saw – Fisk waving wildly, weaving and writhing and gyrating along the first-base line, as he wished the ball fair, forced it fair with his entire body.

 

He circled the bases in triumph, in sudden company with several hundred fans, and jumped on home plate with both feet, and John Kiley, the Fenway Park organist, played Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” fortissimo, and then followed with other appropriately exuberant classical selections, and for the second time that evening I suddenly remembered all my old absent and distant Sox-afflicted friends (and all the other Red Sox fans, all over New England), and I thought of them – in Brookline, Mass., and Brooklin, Maine; in Beverly Farms and Mashpee and Presque Isle and North Conway and Damariscotta; in Pomfret, Connecticut, and Pomfret, Vermont; in Wayland and Providence and Revere and Nashua, and in both the Concords and all five Manchesters, and in Raymond, New Hampshire (where Carlton Fisk lives), and Bellows Falls, Vermont (where Carlton Fisk was born), and I saw all of them dancing and shouting and kissing and leaping about like the fans at Fenway – jumping up and down in their bedrooms and kitchens and living rooms, and in bars and trailers, and even in some boats here and there, I suppose, and on back-country roads (a lone driver getting the news over the radio and blowing his horn over and over, and finally pulling up and getting out and leaping up and down on the cold macadam, yelling into the night), and all of them, for once at least, utterly joyful and believing in that joy – alight with it.

 

It should be added, of course, that very much the same sort of celebration probably took place the following night in the midlands towns and vicinities of the Reds’ supporters – in Otterbein and Scioto; in Frankfort, Sardinia, and Summer Shade; in Zanesville and Louisville and Akron and French Lick and Loveland. I am not enough of a social geographer to know if the faith of the Red Sox is deeper or hardier than that of a Reds rooter (although I secretly believe that it may be, because of his longer and more bitter disappointments down the years). What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for.

 

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look – I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring – caring deeply and passionately, really caring – which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete – the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the hap hazardous flight of a distant ball – seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

• The two issues are completely unrelated.
• The Second Amendment creates a right in the text of the Constitution. The right will be abused, like all rights. No “gun control” will stop those who will abuse the right from doing it, often with deadly consequences. Law abiding citizens should not forfeit their rights because the nation’s criminals, sociopaths and nutjobs abuse them.
• There was never a Constitution-based right to abortion.
• Protesting a SCOTUS decision or an enumerated constitutional right is useless and pointless.
• As for her claims that nobody needs “all these guns” if they aren’t using them to hunt, the response is: Neither you nor the government have any business telling anyone else what they “need.” The Second Amendment says that individuals get to decide what they “need.”

But I didn’t say any of these things. I changed the subject. Continue reading →

Whenever I see one of the several “Love is Love” lawn signs in my Alexandria, VA. neighborhood, I think of the poster girl for untrustworthy teachers, Mary Kay Letourneau. This is her anniversary, the day she married her former student, her rape victim ten years earlier, and the father of two of her children, Vili Fualaau, 22.  Letourneau had been released from prison after serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for raping him while teaching at Shorewood Elementary School, in the Seattle suburb of Burien.  Letourneau, was 34 when she began  a sexual relationship with the 12-year-old. At the time, she was married and had four children. 

But it was all OK, you see, because they were in love. I wrote about Letourneau several times. I ended this post, a few years before the happy couple’s marriage, this way:

It is absolutely a perversion of law, ethics and common sense that she should be permitted to pick up where she left off seven years ago, building on the young man’s attachments he had formed toward a trusted teacher to exploit him sexually and emotionally. Allowing her this creates an incentive for other disturbed teachers and adult supervisors to distort their young charges’ affections, ignoring the long term harm that is certain to result.

What Villi needed years ago was counseling and treatment, so that he could escape this illicit and illegal emotional attachment created by his teacher. Unfortunately, Villi’s family is of the same strange mindset as the Springer crowd, and never perceived the wrongfulness of LeTourneau’s conduct, or the damage it caused. Her betrayal of trust screamed out for a civil suit, as surely as any Catholic priest’s molestation. Then, perhaps her victim could have received help, and would now be moving into healthy relationships and a life far away from his seductress-teacher.

That is not to be, it appears. But a relationship that was ethically wrong in its inception does not suddenly become right simply because it is no longer illegal.

Yecchh. But today’s Disney employees would probably approve…

1. She truly is an incompetent and ignorant woman, you know. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Instagram to join the fatuous “Roe v. Wade is being reversed because of religious fanatics!” chorus with this argument:

For people who say ‘oh, but you’re harming a life, I believe this is life’, well some religions don’t. So how about that?

Our Jewish brothers and sisters, they are able to have an abortion according to their faith.

There are so many faiths that do not have this same definition of life as fundamentalist Christians. And so what about their rights? What about their rights to exercise their faith?

It’s ridiculous and it is theocratic. It’s authoritarian. It is wrong.

I shouldn’t have to specify what’s moronic about that, but just in case: Continue reading →