baseball

Sports Ethics Scoreboard!

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Sports scoreboard

This is All-Star week in baseball, and I’ll be boycotting the game (see below), but this is a good time to note several ethics developments in the Wide, Wide World of Sports:

In cycling: The idiot who caused a massive accident during the Tour de France was identified: she surrendered to authorities right before they were preparing to arrest her. A French prosecutor said that the woman will face trial in October on charges of reckless endangerment and involuntarily causing injuries, but there is still doubt that this will occur. She’s sorry. She’s ashamed. The police have been getting hate emails. All she wanted to do was send “an affectionate message to her grandparents.” Would the woman attracts such sympathy if a couple of the cyclists had been killed because of her stunt? Yet the fact that they were not is pure moral luck.

In pro football: The NFL fined the Washington Football Team, formerly the Redskins before the death of a black man in Minnesota somehow mandated a name change, $10 million last week following  an independent investigation that found the team’s work environment was “highly unprofessional” in its treatment of women. Fifteen former female employees and two journalists who covered the team accused team staffers of sexual harassment and verbal abuse. The attorney who led the investigation, said ownership and senior management “paid little or no attention” to the workplace culture, in some cases, acting inappropriately themselves.  The investigation concluded that franchise owner Dan Snyder was responsible for the club’s unprofessional and intimidating culture, and that he failed to establish a respectful work environment.Yes, the fish rots from the head down.

In the Olympics: African American hammer thrower Gwen Berry announced her intention of using the Tokyo Olympics to protest against the U.S.after turning her back on the flag during preliminaries. It appears the vast majority of Americans don’t sympathize. A I&I/TIPP poll finds that the public overwhelmingly rejects athletes showing disrespect for the American flag at international games, with 79% of the public saying it’s important “for professional athletes to publicly respect the American flag on the international level,” and 60% saying it is “very important.” 16% of the adults surveyed think it’s not important. (Who ARE these people?)

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Tuesday That Feels Like Monday Ethics Clarifications, 7/6/2021

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

clarifications

1. What a surprise! Cheating works! Since Major League Baseball decided to enforce its 100 year old rule against doctoring the baseball as pitchers had recently begun using glue to let them throw faster and snap off devastating curve balls, the results have been obvious and significant. In a month since umpires were directed to check, the MLB batting average has gone up by seven points (it was at a record low before the enforcement). Scoring has increased, and several pitchers rumored to be dependent of “the sticky stuff,” notably Yankee All-Star Gerrit Cole, have been hit hard in recent starts. This is because, of the 35 pitchers with the highest four-seam spin rate on June 3, 33 of them saw a decline in spin rate since then by an average drop of 96 RPMs. Consequently, batters aren’t striking out as often.

2. Please clarify: Should I apply the Julie Principle to Maxine Waters? We know she’s an idiot, ignorant, partisan to the point of poisoning democracy and a race-baiting, hateful blight on Congress, her party, the nation and homo sapiens generally. Is there anything accomplished by complaining about Waters acting like Waters, since she’s obviously not going to change? [You can refresh your understanding of the Julie Principle here.] Water was in fine, typical form over the Independence day weekend, blathering as only a fool like her could,

“July 4th … & so, the Declaration of Independence says all men are created equal,” Waters began. “Equal to what? What men? Only white men? Isn’t it something that they wrote this in 1776 when African Americans were enslaved? They weren’t thinking about us then, but we’re thinking about us now!”

Of course, we know that “they” were thinking about black slaves a great deal, as anyone who reads about the debate over the Declaration in the Continental Congress knows. But why should a senior Congresswoman know anything about the founding of the nation? Maxine continued,

“Further, the Dec. of Ind. says we hold these truths to be “self-evident”… yet:

– 17 states have enacted voter suppression laws

– Supreme Court gutted Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act

– George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice

Need I say more? #July4”

No, actually, Maxine, you didn’t even need to say that: we already knew you were a blathering, hateful dummy. But just to clarify:

  • Laws that are intended to ensure the integrity of elections are not “voter suppression laws”
  • The Supreme Court confirmed that the Federal Government should not meddle in state matters except for demonstrable evidence of racial bias, and since the standards in Sec. 5 of the Voting Rights Act were based on the conduct of Southern states through 1964 only (that’s 57 years ago) and thus did not reflect any reforms, changes or improvement, making the law out of date, SCOTUS quite correctly demanded new data and Congressional update. Get to work.
  • There is literally zero evidence that George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, or Tamir Rice met their unfortunate fates because of racial bias.

Or is it silly even to pay attention to Waters’ incurable bile?

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Ethics Heroes: The New York Yankees

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

bat girl

Now you know, if you know anything about me, that the headline above was not easy for me to write. Fair, however is fair.

Gwen Goldman was 10-years-old in 1961 when she wrote to her favorite baseball team and said that she wanted to be the Yankees’ batgirl. She got a response, too, from the Yankees GM Roy Hamey. His answer, on a letter with the Yankee logo that Gwen framed and hangs in her home today, was that baseball wasn’t for girls. “In a game dominated by men a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout,” he wrote in part. “I am sure you can understand.”

This year, her adult daughter Abby emailed a photo of the letter to the team, and current Yankees GM Brian Cashman saw it. Last week, on the 60th anniversary of Hamey’s original letter, Cashman contacted Gwen Goldman to tell her that she would finally be able to achieve her dream of being a batgirl for her beloved Yankees. And so it was that yesterday night she was the honorary batgirl for the Yankees in their game against the Los Angeles Angels. It was part of the team’s HOPE Week, a tradition the Yankees started in 2009 to promote acts of goodwill that could provide hope and encouragement to others.

“This dream of 60 years that didn’t happen is happening,” Goldman said before her big night. “It’s thanks to Abby, starting it going, and to the Yankees organization for being at the forefront of believing about breaking down those gender barriers. The letter Brian Cashman wrote to me [that’s the one in her left hand, above] , it’s just beautiful and speaks a lot to who they are as an organization, trying to do what’s right. … I picked the right team to be a fan of, didn’t I?”

Well, no, Gwen, it’s the wrong team, but this time they did the right thing.

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Friday Ethics Wrap-Up, 6/25/21: Little Bighorn Edition

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

On June 25, 1876, Sioux and Cheyenne forces led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull wiped out the U.S. Army troops of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn near southern Montana’s Little Bighorn River. Custer had been asking for such a fate for sure: he had long been crippled by hubris, ambition and arrogance, despite other compensating positive leadership traits and one extremely important success, which I’ll write about again in about a week. The U.S. Army had also firmly established themselves as the bad guys in this true life Western. After gold was discovered in South Dakota’s Black Hills, in the previous year, the U.S. Army ignored previous treaty agreements and invaded the region. Custer and some 200 men blundered into the Little Bighorn Valley where his battalion was overcome by 3,000 angry warriors. Custer and every last one of his soldier had been killed within an hour. The Battle of the Little Bighorn, better known as “Custer’s Last Stand,” was the most decisive Native American victory and the worst U.S. Army defeat in the long Plains Indian War. It was a classic Pyrrhic victory, of course. Custer was elevated to undeserved martyr status, and the U.S. Government redoubled its efforts against Native Americans. Within five years, almost all of the Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne were confined to reservations.

It took a while for history, popular culture and public opinion to catch up with reality regarding Custer. More than 20 movies and too many television shows to count portrayed him as a hero right into the Sixties. Among the actors who played the doomed and dashing cavalry leader: Ronald Reagan, Errol Flynn, Leslie Neilson, Robert Shaw, and Sheb Wooley, who sang the hit ’50’s ditty “Purple People Eater.” The tide turned against Custer for good after some critical biographies and when Richard Mulligan played him as preening idiot in the dark Western satire “Little Big Man” in 1970.

There was cosmic justice for Custer, if not for the Indians he persecuted.

1. Perhaps the greatest IIPTDXTTNMIAFB we will ever see! I really jumped the gun earlier this month when I marked a ridiculous lie out of the mouth of President Biden as an “IIPTDXTTNMIAFB for the ages.” ( The initials stand for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”“Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden.”) That doesn’t come within miles of Biden’s extemporaneous tough guy blather during his recent “all of the recent increase in crime in Democrat-run cities is caused by guns” speech, when he began with a historical gaffe, saying that a citizen couldn’t buy a cannon in Revolutionary times (citizens could buy cannons and did well into the 20th Century—the crazy publisher of the Los Angeles Times had one mounted on the hood of his car) and then really jumping the responsible Potus shark with this:

“Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

This has been discussed a bit today in the Open Forum, so I will just add that if Trump had said anything like this, Democrats and the news media would be screaming that he was psychologically unfit to be President, and that the 25th Amendment should be put into action immediately. But Trump never said anything that crazy or threatening. In addition to the statement being bellicose and offensive, it also evinces that understanding of the Second Amendment of the average 14-year-old. The Second Amendment like the rest of the Bill of Rights, was created to ensure that the Federal government knew its place, and also knew that like the colonies, American citizens would not surrender their liberties without a fight. The Founders never thought local groups of armed citizens could prevail in combat against the full resources of the Federal government, even in a world without AR-15s, nukes, and tanks. But they knew that the prospect of substantial numbers of armed citizens would deter government tyranny, assuming sane leadership. For example, an attempt to go houise to house confiscating guns would be unacceptably bloody and risk turning a majority of the public against the government.

Even though the news media is already trying to memory-hole Joe’s stupid threat, it is destined to haunt him, and should.

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In Iowa, An Unattributed Shout Of “Let Him Hang” Becomes A National Race Incident…

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I missed this story; luckily a reader, whom I am not certain whether he wants his name posted, didn’t. He sent it to me, writing in part, “So the catcher [Yes, it’s a baseball story] clapped and the word hang was heard. Both could be explained by the way teams talk to each other to cheer the team on. But it’s presented as if a MAJOR racial incident occurred. A half page article in a major news publication designed to stir animosity.”

That’s exactly what happened, though it wasn’t just the news media, it was all triggered by a mixed-race high school baseball player’s mother who has been conditioned to see racism whether it is in evidence or not. This is another success of the progressive racial outrage project.

Here is what happened, courtesy of the Des Moines Register yesterday. I’m going to interject my analysis as we go along to save time:

“Norwalk Warriors baseball player Ryan Wood was up to bat with three balls and two strikes in a doubleheader against Dallas Center-Grimes on Friday as his mother, Lisa Wood, watched from a seat in the stands. Wood said the DCG pitcher threw a ball into the opposite batter box, “practically in the dirt,” and Ryan, who recently graduated from Norwalk, went to walk to first base. He was halfway there when the umpire called a strike.”

Comment: Typical parent: Ryan’s mom was well up the third base line, but she was certain that she saw the pitch better than the umpire, who was behind the plate and inches away. Baseball players are coached to sometime try to steal a ball four call by starting to walk to first base. Once in a blue moon, it works.

“While Ryan, who is of mixed race, walked back to the plate, Lisa Wood said that DCG’s catcher clapped in her son’s face. “My son strikes out and the catcher yells at him ‘Go sit down,’ …And then somebody — whether it was the catcher or another in the dugout … somebody said, ‘Let him hang.’” Wood said the racial jeer was so loud that all of the parents near the outfield heard it, adding that she was “so shocked” that she turned to her 14-yearold daughter, who was sitting next to her in the stands to confirm what she’d heard.”

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Baseball Has A Cheating Problem That Is Old, Was Supposedly Addressed Decades Ago, And Is Strangling The Game. It Is Relevant To More Than Baseball (Part 3: The Crackdown)

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcMbwcf4owo

Before the 2021 season started, Major League Baseball claimed that it was about to start enforcing the rule against applying foreign substances to the baseball. Why. one might wonder. As Part I described, baseball has been casual about this rule for a long time, and the pattern goes back even longer than when Ethics Alarms first discussed it. In 1920, the game, trying to clean up its tarnished image in the wake of 1919 Black Sox scandal, banned the spitball as well as other “trick pitches” that involved altering the ball itself a few pitchers who were regarded as “spitball specialists” were “grandfathered” meaning that they were allowed to keep throwing the otherwise illegal pitch while others were not. This is not the way to make a rule against cheating, and the ambivalence about the spitball continued well into the 1980s. Baseball, and especially sportswriters, seemed to think this particular kind of cheating was cute. Only a few pitchers could throw a spitball, and those who did, notably Gaylord Perry, now in the Hall of Fame, were only occasionally caught and punished. Baseball finally made a rule that a pitcher couldn’t bring his fingers to his mouth; if he did, an automatic ball was called. Meanwhile, umpire searches of a suspected pitcher using other substances like K-Y jelly, usually hidden in a cap, became the stuff of comedy, as in the famous sequence from “The Naked Gun” above.

MLB became lax about enforcement, and predictably, some pitchers, and eventually most pitchers, took what was accepted as a “little” pine tar to get a better grip on the ball and, aided by modern chemistry, began using so-called “sticky stuff” to get higher rates of spin on the ball than they could with their natural talents. This development accelerated after 2018, when home runs became more common than ever before. When the rate of homers reached absurd levels in 2019, breaking the rules against putting foreign substances on the ball was viewed as a matter of professional survival. Pitchers experimented, trying Tyrus Sticky Grip, Firm Grip spray, Pelican Grip Dip stick and Spider Tack, a glue intended for use in World’s Strongest Man competitions and whose advertisements show someone using it to lift a cinder block with his palm. Some combined several of those products to create their own personal “sticky stuff.” Their clubs used Edgertronic high-speed cameras and TrackMan and Rapsodo pitch-tracking devices to see which version of the glue worked best.

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Baseball Has A Cheating Problem …It Is Relevant To More Than Baseball (Part 2): Unethical Quote Of The Week: Boston Red Sox Manager Alex Cora

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Cora

“I come from suspension and I know how embarrassing that is and how tough that is, not only on you as a person but your family, your friends and the people that love you. Ten games, a year, two years, three years, it doesn’t matter. Being suspended is hell and you don’t want to go through that. I was very open to them and hopefully they understand that.”

—Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora on Major League Baseball’s threat of 10 game suspensions for pitchers  caught cheating by using sticky substances on baseballs , a practice that has been against the rules  for a hundred years.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote that Alex Cora, then serving a one year suspension from Major League baseball, didn’t “get it,” it being why cheating is wrong, what ethics is, and why it is important to act ethically in all aspects of life. He still doesn’t get it. Cora (you can catch up here) was suspended because he engineered and oversaw a  season long sign-stealing scheme as bench coach in 2017 for the Houston Astros, who used it to inflate their offense and ultimately win the World Series. When it was finally discovered, Cora was the acclaimed manager of the Boston Red Sox, who succeeded the Astros as World Champions in 2018. The Red Sox had been cheating in their triumphant season too, though not as extensively, and  an investigation blamed it all on a low-level coach., not Cora, though Cora was his supervisor, and the whole thing seemed oddly reminiscent of Cora’s cheating in Houston. Continue reading →

Baseball Has A Cheating Problem That Is Old, Was Supposedly Addressed Decades Ago, And Is Strangling The Game. It Is Relevant To More Than Baseball (Part 1: Introduction)

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Baseball sticky

Since about four other readers pay any attention to my baseball ethics posts, let me say right up front why this a mistake. Baseball’s current pitchers using foreign substances on the ball problem is, ethically, exactly the same as our nation’s election cheating scandal, or the illegal immigration crisis. It arises from the same dead-headed rationalizations, intellectual laziness, and self-serving deception. We can and should learn from it. But we won’t.

If you want to ignore the latest baseball ethics scandal as a niche problem unrelated to greater ethics principles, be my guest. You will be missing an important and still developing lesson.

Baseball’s hitting is way down this year, and pitching is more dominant than it has been since the mid-1960s. There is a reason: almost every pitcher is using some kind of sticky substance on the ball. This increases “spin rate,” which before computers and other technology was impossible to see, much less measure. The faster a pitcher can make a ball spin, the more it moves, curves and dives at higher speeds. Sticky substances allow a pitcher to do that. Using them is against the rules; it’s cheating. But for years now, the same kind of ethics-addled fools who allowed Barry Bonds and other cheats to use illegal steroids and wreck the game’s home run records as long as they lied about it have let pitchers illegally doctor the ball.

This week, the whole, completely avoidable ethics train wreck became an engine of destruction for the National Pastime.

Unfortunately, one has to understand the context to comprehend what is going on now, and that means looking backwards, in this case, to 2014. Here, with some edits, are two Ethics Alarms essays that provide the context. The first was titled “The Abysmal Quality of Ethical Reasoning in Baseball: A Depressing Case Study.” The second, Pineda-Pine Tar, Part II: Baseball Clarifies Its Bizarro Ethics Culture, appeared 13 days later. Yes, what is happening now was foretold by conditions that were evident seven years ago. The remaining parts of this series will bring you, and the train wreck, up to date.

***

What happened was this: During last night’s Red Sox-Yankee game in Yankee Stadium, the Boston broadcasting team of Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy noticed a glossy brown substance on New York starting pitcher Michael Pineda’s pitching hand. It was very obvious, especially once the NESN cameras started zooming in on it.   “There’s that substance, that absolutely looks like pine tar,” play-by-play man Don Orsillo said. “Yeah, that’s not legal,” color commentator and former player Jerry Remy replied.

Indeed it isn’t.  According to rule 8.02(a)(2), (4) and (5), the pitcher shall not expectorate on the ball, either hand or his glove; apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball; [or]  deface the ball in any manner.

The Red Sox, who probably knew about the gunk on Pineda’s hand, didn’t complain to the umpires, and just went about their merry way, losing the game. Asked about the stuff on his hand, Pineda demonstrated the full range of body language indicating that he was lying his head off. “It was dirt,’ he said. Later, when the ick appeared to be gone,  Pineda explained, he had just sweated his hand clean. Right. Whatever was on his hand—beef gravy, crankcase oil, chocolate syrup…the majority of pundits think pine tar—it wasn’t “dirt.” Pineda’s manager, Joe Girardi, was brazenly evasive.

The Yankee pitcher was cheating. This isn’t a major scandal, but cheating is cheating: sports shouldn’t allow cheating of any kind, because if a sport allows some cheating, however minor, it will encourage cynical, unscrupulous and unethical individuals on the field, in the stands, and behind keyboard to excuse all other forms of cheating, from corked bats to performance enhancing drugs. Cheating is wrong. Cheating unfairly warps the results of games, and rewards dishonesty rather than skill. Cheating undermines the enjoyment of any game among serious fans who devote energy and passion to it. Any cheating is a form of rigging, a variety of lying.

And yet, this clear instance of cheating, caught on video, primarily sparked the sports commentariat, including most fans, to cite one rationalization and logical fallacy after another to justify doing nothing, and not just doing nothing, but accepting the form of cheating as “part of the game.” I’ve been reading columns and listening to the MLB channel on Sirius-XM and watch the MLB channel on Direct TV since this episode occurred. Here are the reactions:

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 6/3/2021

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I like to use this clip to start the day at least once a month….I’m also trying to overcome my cognitive dissonance regarding the film it’s from, in my view the greatest film musical ever made (no better one is likely to appear in the future), and the fact that the man it was made to honor, songwriter Arthur Freed who also ran MGM’s musical division during its “Golden Age,” exposed himself to a teenaged Shirley Temple when she was considering a move to that studio after her singing and dancing tot career at RKO had been ended by hormones. That information, which I only discovered this year, really has made “Singin’ in the Rain” hard to watch for me, much as O.J. Simpson’s presence almost ruins “The Naked Gun.”

1. Speaking of movie clips, this one is apt:

Actor John Cena posted a video to Sena Wiebo, China’s Twitterish social media platform, apologizing to Chinese fans—in Mandarin!– for calling Taiwan a “country” in his recent interview promoting “F9,” the latest installment of the “Fast & Furious” franchise. What a weasel. There may be diplomatic reasons that justify apologies to China, but an American citizen kowtowing to this Evil Empire (that just recently gave its citizens permission to have up to three children) is despicable. China maintains that it has dominion over Taiwan, a self-governed democracy that maintains its own sovereignty, while China is, in essence, a totalitarian regime. Cena grovelled because Chinese ticket sales are an essential part of most Hollywood movies’ profit, but apparently he did not grovel enough for China, and too much for Americans.

Ticket sales for “F9” in China have crashed, according to the Hollywood Reporter, because Cena was supposed to say that Taiwan is part of China. They have crashed in the U.S., because the kinds of Americans who are likely to go to “Fast and Furious” films tend not to appreciate actors who suck up to a genocidal, pandemic-spreading international menace.

2. Regarding Donald Trump, please refer to everything I wrote about him prior to November, 2016. His latest fiasco, the one-month blog that was just pulled down with all of its posts deleted, is signature significance. Trump doesn’t have sufficient respect for his followers, his party or the world in general to plan, be responsible, appear trustworthy, or to do or say anything but what pops into his head at a given moment. If he cared about the nation, he would be working to find a younger, less polarizing figure. Ideally, this individual would be blessed with charisma and ability, and could hold on to Trump’s supporters while appealing to NeverTrump conservatives and those disgusted with the Biden administration. That should be just about everybody who doesn’t advocate repealing the Bill of Rights. Instead, he’s on his usual ego trip, giving the news media constant opportunities to use his nonsense to keep the Trump Hate pandemic raging, and the public distracted from real problems, like…

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Memorial Day Ethics Warm-Up, 5/31/2021…

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

It will be interesting to see if the news media discusses the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 any more this May 31 than it has in the past. Discussing this horrible mass murder of blacks in Oklahoma over Memorial Day weekend has always been seen as sufficiently tasteless that the story has suffered the equivalent of a historical airbrushing. When did you first learn about it? I didn’t encounter the episode in elementary school, high school, college or law school. I was 50, and furiously researching the life of Clarence Darrow so I could churn out a one man show (that was already in rehearsal) after Leslie Nielsen pulled the rights we had paid for on the Darrow show performed on Broadway by Henry Fonda. I was looking for the context of Darrow’s epic closing argument in the Sweet case (1925), in which he referenced examples of white mob violence against blacks. That was my introduction to the tragedy. How was this possible? I was and am a voracious consumer of American history, movies, and television. Yet the facts of the Tulsa Race Massacre never entered my consciousness.

Here’s one useful resource…there are many others available online. A brief summary: After World War I, Tulsa’s African American community was notable for its affluence. The Greenwood District was known as “Black Wall Street.” But on May 30, 1921, an incident between a white woman and a black man on an elevator—nobody knows exactly what happened—was reported in the Tulsa newspapers as an attempted rape. The young African-American, Dick Rowland, had been arrested, and members of the community believed that he might be lynched. When an angry white mob gathered in front of the courthouse, a group of over 70 back men, some of them World War I veterans with weapons, confronted them. A gun went off in a struggled, and chaos descended on Greenwood. A white mob of thousands overran the Greenwood District, shooting unarmed black citizens in the streets. It burned an area of some 35 city blocks, and more than 1,200 houses, numerous businesses, a school, a hospital and a dozen churches. It is estimated that 300 people were killed in the rampage, though official counts at the time were much lower. 300 is the same death toll as the 1871 Chicago fire. I knew about that tragedy by the time I was 8.

1. IIPTDXTTNMIAFB! That’s short for “Imagine if President Trump did X that the news media is accepting from Biden…”, introduced here. The current example: during a speech at Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Langley,Virginia two days ago, President Biden began spontaneously complimenting a pre-teen girl who had joined her parents and two older brothers on the stage after her mother had introduced Biden to the crowd. Biden said, inappropriately and creepily, “ I love those barrettes in your hair, man. I tell you what, look at her. She looks like she’s 19 years old sitting there like a little lady with her legs crossed.” Republicans pounced, as the MSM cliche goes whenever Democrats are legitimately criticized. The episode was barely mentioned by the media dedicated to propping up Biden—that is, almost all of it—at all. IIPTDXTTNMIAFB…and President Trump didn’t even have a photographically preserved series of encounters like this:

Creepy-Joe-Biden-President

2. AHHHH! It’s a virus ! Get a gun!!! The headline on the front page of the NYT website yesterday read, “Pandemic Fuels Surge in U.S. Gun Sales ‘Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen.'” Incredible. People bought guns for the first time because rioting was going on all over the country, and in many places the police were doing little or nothing to stop it. Buildings were burning and being looted; citizens were being threatened. Who gets a gun to fight a pandemic? (There was never any threat of the kind of civic breakdown from the virus like that portrayed in the movie “Contagion.” Toilet paper riots?)

The degree to which the Times—the “paper of record’!—continues to distort reality to mislead the public and warp public opinion is astounding. Later in the same article, the Times said, “While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.”

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