The far right’s perverse reaction to the Griner release

There was a time when the release of a wrongfully-detained American citizen by an authoritarian enemy would have been greeted by the far right with flag-waving and cheers. That time has apparently passed.

Judging from the reaction of conservatives, the fact that Brittney Griner is: a) a lesbian; b) a supporter of Black Lives Matter (a loose, unorganized grouping of people some of whom advocate violence); c) not one of several supposedly more deserving Americans being held by Russia whose release in exchange for Russian arms trafficker Victor Bout was not offered; and/or d) was released as a result of negotiations by a Democratic administration, means that instead of being an occasion for celebration, her homecoming after incarceration for unknowingly violating a ridiculous Russian law against the possession of a non-psychoactive cannabis derivative duly prescribed by a doctor is an outrage.

Not sure whether Griner’s race or sexual orientation or political views make her less than a human being in the eyes of the MAGA crowd and maybe less of an American, or whether the absurdity of the law and the accidental character of Griner’s violation of it demands remorseless retribution in the minds of these people rather than serving as rather substantial mitigation. But the attitude of those who are unhappy about her release stinks. Yes, other Americans in Russian custody also deserve their freedom. But they were not the ones whose freedom was offered, and the mean-spiritedness of Americans who begrudge Griner her freedom makes me sick.

The reaction of so many on the far right to the Griner/Bout exchange is another example of the moral and philosophical perversity of what passes for conservatism these days. Coinciding as it does with a week in which conservatives either excused or minimized Donald Trump’s proposal that the Constitution be ignored if it serves a goal he regards as desirable, and I have to think that Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater and Bob Taft are rolling like dervishes in their graves over what was a political movement based on ethics and even-handedness and reverence for that Constitution.

It’s been a while

I haven’t posted on this blog for a while. There have been several reasons for that. I won’t get into them; suffice it to say that I’m going to try to do better. For now, though, like to talk about two things.

Last month I lost someone very dear to me. Lisa Marie Stapp was a writer, at one time a professor of Ethics, and a devout Lutheran Christian- a far better one than I. She was born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a genetic condition that prevented her muscles from developing. She divided her life between her bed and her wheelchair. She had a powerful but gentle intellect, a wry sense of humor, and an incredible amount of courage. She was my hero. She was also the most important person in the world to me. She made me want to be a better person and a better Christian. I miss her terribly. My grieving will go on for a very long time, but that’s OK. She was worth it. Her memory will loom large in my mind and heart however many years still remain in my life. I can hardly wait until the moment comes my pastor pointed me toward when I get to heaven and Lisa, who never even walked in this world and couldn’t even adjust the glasses on her nose, runs up to me, throws her arms around my neck, and gives me a big hug.

The second thing on my mind is Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court decision that reversed the ill-considered Roe v. Wade. The extremists in both parties are having a great time with Dobbs. Republicans- many of them- are going beyond the traditional pro-life position and advocating the outlawing of abortion even when the mother’s life is in danger. This is quite rightly being called out as abortion extremism, and we are hearing a great deal about the voters’ displeasure at it. Predictably, we hear very little about the position taken by literally every 2020 Democratic presidential candidate with the exceptions of Joe Biden and Amy Klochobar, supporting a “right to choose” throughout pregnancy, right up until the moment of birth. This, of course, goes far beyond Roe, and poll after poll shows that it’s just as out of step with the American public as the Republican position I just described. Yet somehow, the abortion extremism which continues to characterize the average Democratic politician doesn’t get characterized as such by the media.

Doubtless, it was the extreme positions being taken by Republican politicians, rather than Dobbs as such, against which the voters reacted so strongly at the polls earlier this month. In fact, the polls I’ve seen that accurately characterize Dobbs as simply returning abortion law from the Federal level to the states, where the Constitution intended such things to be, show support and opposition to the decision as divided just about equally. Yet prejudicially-worded polling questions and the strong pro-choice bias of the media obscure the fact that we remain a nation closely divided on the subject of abortion.

Americans don’t want abortion outlawed across the board, including in cases of rape, incest, a threat to the life of the mother, and gross fetal abnormalities incompatible with life. But on the other hand, they don’t want abortion on demand in the third trimester, either! The American public takes a thoughtful and nuanced position on the matter. But sadly, as is so often the case these days, the public debate is being carried out between the extremes, and the spin doctors of both the right and the left are distorting where we as a society actually stand on abortion. Truly accurate information is becoming harder and harder to come by. Both politicians and the media seem more concerned with advancing agendas than with meeting Americans where they are. And tragically, a deeply divided nation is led to believe that it’s even more deeply divided than it actually is, and the task of consensus-building and dialog upon which democracy depends is becoming more and more impossible.

Why I just quit Twitter

Let’s get a few things straight right off the bat.

First, freedom of speech has nothing to do with Twitter. The First Amendment protects our speech from suppression by the government. It simply does not apply to privately-owned platforms like Twitter.

Secondly, much of what Twitter restricts could be restricted without violating the First Amendment even if the government owned Twitter. Libel (which Twitter actually permits, and is engaged in quite freely by extremists on both ends of the political spectrum) isn’t covered by the First Amendment. Neither is subversion or false information likely to cause actual harm to people or property. Restricting COVID misinformation isn’t a violation of free speech. It’s common sense and common decency. In Justice Holmes’s famous formulation, “Freedom of speech does not grant the right to falsely shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theatre.”

Vulgarity and, I would argue, hate speech cannot be constitutionally restricted by the government. But the Constitution in no way prohibits a private platform like Twitter from restricting them, and I, for one, have until now been grateful that for the most part, Twitter has done so in the past. Apparently, it will not do so, or at least do so consistently, now that Elon Musk is in charge.

Conservative opinions are not being suppressed on Twitter under the current rules. Proven lies, particularly vicious and widespread slander of individuals and groups unsupported by actual evidence or even logic, hate speech, treason, and the kind of misinformation that has cost tens of thousands of lives are being restricted, and it would be irresponsible and immoral to do otherwise. But it seems that under the new ownership Twitter will throw responsibility and ethics to the winds.

A strong argument can be made that Twitter was toxic all along. Nothing resembling reasoned discussion and debate takes place there. Instead, malice, invective, wild claims and accusations, and groundless conspiracy theories abound. These thrive on a platform like Twitter, which is ideally suited to promote assertions but woefully inadequate to hold them up to the light of scrutiny. The very format militates against reasoned argument and is guaranteed to produce heat, but very little light.

I, personally, am not the most patient of people, especially when it comes to those in the grips of the Dunning-Kruger effect; who consider themselves possessed of a great deal of accurate information, the judgment to discern truth and falsehood, and the intelligence to form reasonable opinions, but who in fact possess none of them. Debating with fools is a fool’s errand at best, and too often I’ve been foolish enough to have allowed myself to be drawn into it by the folly of others. One cannot, as the saying goes, reason people out of what they were never reasoned into. Reason is useless in conversations with people who are either unwilling to resort to it or simply lacking in rationality. Suffering fools gladly is not my strong suit, alas, and all to often I have found myself descending to their level on Twitter, resorting to insulting people with whom it is impossible to reason. I do not like the person I become when I use Twitter the way it’s intended to be used. So I don’t do it often.

But Twitter has had its purpose. It’s been a platform for this blog. And it’s a place to post memes and links to important news stories or columns and editorials I think need to be widely read.

But with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, a bad situation will be made infinitely worse. Conspiracy theories and other insane assertions will be everywhere, spread in an environment whose very nature protects them from challenge. Lies will be easily spread, as Donald Trump proved so convincingly before reason prevailed and he was denied access to Twitter. The “tweet” format is perfectly suited to spreading lies and other mere assertions. But truth- and above all, the information needed to refute those lies- is often more complicated than mere assertions. Facts need more words to be asserted in the face of lies than the lies need. That’s the crucial reason why the restrictions against the most dangerous lies were so important on Twitter. It’s easier to start a fire than to put it out, and in a forum like Twitter, lies and paranoia have a huge built-in advantage over truth and sanity.

Now, with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter under the false flag of “free speech,” truth and sanity won’t have a chance. Twitter is about to become nothing but a cesspool of assertions which cannot be as easily challenged as they are made. It will become a snakepit of lies and distortions, of shrill paranoia and bigotry from both ends of the political spectrum in which reason and sanity and temperence and moderation will simply have no chance. If it ever was a forum for rational debate and discussion, it will cease to be one now.

I suppose I could continue to use it as a forum for posts from this blog, and memes, and links to articles I think need to be read. But in a forum in which logic and evidence and truth will now be drowned out by lies and hate and conspiracy theories and every other paranoid and evil thing that can be so easily spread but not challenged in such a forum, it’s not hard to see what will happen next. There will be nobody left on Twitter who would read them or get the point if they did.

Sane and reasonable people are going to stop beating their heads against the wall of willful and self-impressed ignorance. They will stop trying to confront easily-tweeted lies with more complicated facts and truth. The fever dreams which are the far right and far left Twittersphere- the fantasy worlds of the hard-core Trumpers and the the most delusional of the Woke- will be the sum and substance of Twitter. There simply will be nothing of any substance or sanity left worth mentioning. All that will be left will be assertions, no matter how malicious, false, destructive, or downright crazy, and no way left to refute them.

It may take a while for some to realize it, but with hate speech and proven lies and medical misinformation and the vulgarity of the darkest places in our hearts now set loose upon Twitter, it will no longer be possible for truth and reason and sanity to make a stand there. Before long, the reasonable and the thoughtful and the kind-hearted will abandon a forum for which they are so ill-suited and for which the simplistic and the cruel and the ignorant and the malicious are right are empowered and at home.

Twitter under Elon Musk and his twisted notion of “free speech” will have no place for intelligence or real debate, and even less for nuance. It will be all about shouting, not discussing. Well, if the truth be told, maybe it always has been. But now there will be no limits to the lies and the libel and conspiracy theories in a forum in which they are easily spread and essentially impossible to refute. And in a society already so deeply immersed and crippled by the ease with which lies can spread between minds and hearts eager to believe even the craziest of them, Twitter will be a forum in which there is no limit to how crazy and dark the lies may be, and the light of reason, truth, and knowledge will be extinguished.

One cannot reason people out of what they were never reasoned into. And under Elon Musk, Twitter will no longer be a place where reason has even the tenuous place to stand it has now.

The hour of the Neo-Con

While I’m hard to categorize politically- I have a social conscience that has always made me an awkward fit in conservatism as a movement- a case can be made that I’m a neo-conservative, a critter defined by Irving Kristol as “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Neo-conservatism is looked upon these days as an archaic viewpoint. It had its heyday in the administration of the second President Bush. “Paleocons” (traditional conservatives who are often somewhat isolationist in their foreign policy convictions) regard it as discredited. It is not.

What is discredited is the neo-con concept of nation-building. Our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, in retrospect, in Vietnam) have taught the hard but necessary lesson that the United States cannot simply create democracies in countries that have no tradition of democracy and liberal values. A society has to evolve to a certain point before freedom of speech or freedom of the press are ideas that matter to people. Survival, loyalty to clan and tribe, matter more to most people in less developed societies. than political philosophy or ideology. That’s especially the case in places with longstanding and unexamined traditions of feudalism and outright authoritarianism.

But this remains a dangerous world in which history has placed the United States in a unique role, Somebody has always filled that role throughout history, There has always been a predominant power, economically and militarily, to which all the other nations look for leadership and stability. Rome filled that role in ancient times. England played it for centuries. It is not a role nations seek, but one history thrusts upon them.

For a long time, we tried to evade that role. We are, after all, located on the opposite side of the world from the other great powers. We are in a unique position to be economically self-sufficient in a way the nations of the Old World cannot be. And we have the world’s two great oceans to hide behind. The temptation to retreat into a “Fortress America” has always been there. The isolationist instinct that first gave birth to the slogan “America First” back in the Thirties led us to attempt to stand aloof from the gathering storms in Europe and Asia, and a strong argument can be made that it played a major role in allowing Hitler to achieve a degree of dominance in a conflict-shy Europe that made him much harder to stop than he might have been otherwise.

Pearl Harbor discredited the ideology that ironically pretends that neo-conservatism was discredited by Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. A nation that has Hawaii as its western outpost really isn’t protected by the Pacific Ocean after all. Even during the second third of the Twentieth Century, the world was a much smaller place than it was in the day of sailing ships and news taking weeks to travel back and forth between Europe and the New World. World War II, the jet plane, and the intercontinental ballistic missile should have been enough to convince us that isolationism simply isn’t an option in the modern world.

But as a colonel in the North Vietnamese army observed decades ago, democracies have trouble dealing with sacrifice and tend not to be very patient. Democracies have a great deal of trouble staying the course when it comes to lengthy wars, even relatively unbloody ones like Afghanistan. The mistaken wars in Vietnam and the second one in Iraq, and the mishandling of Afghanistan by several consecutive administrations of both parties, have produced a suspicion of foreign military involvement rooted in simple weariness with continual wars whose relationship to our immediate national security are hard to see, and which have failed spectacularly in achieving satisfactory results.

And as that North Vietnamese officer pointed out, authoritarian countries have a far greater capacity for long-term commitments and lengthy wars than democracies, whose people readily grow weary and can vote their nations out of them. Late in the Vietnam War and thereafter, the Democrats became the “dovish” party. Republicans, having abandoned their traditional antipathy for foreign entanglements, became the party of the muscular and assertive international projection of power, the party of the “hawks.” This reached its zenith when the Reagan and first Bush administrations drove the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history.

But with the takeover of the Republican Party by Donald Trump, who revived the discredited slogan “America First,” the GOP returned to its isolationist past. People like Pat Buchanan and the Pauls ceased to represent a minority viewpoint on foreign policy among Republicans. Incredibly, we find ourselves today in a war-weary and profoundly isolationist nation, in which neither of our great political parties is a reliable advocate of the robust projection of American power and the vigorous defense of our national interests abroad. The world lacks a leader. This creates a vacuum that is an open invitation to mischief by bad actors. Ironically, our current squeamishness when it comes to projecting power has made the development of situations in which it becomes necessary for us to do so more likely.

Donald Trump has consistently questioned our membership in NATO. He speaks for the short-sighted but long-standing attitude which sees foreign conflict as “none of our business,” and fails to take into account how profoundly our economy and security are affected by what happens elsewhere. It decries “globalism,” as if withdrawing from our culturally, economically, and politically interdependent Twenty-First Century world and returning to the days when the world was bound together by clipper ships rather than jet planes, television, and the Internet were even an option.

It’s a profoundly unrealistic and self-defeating way of dealing with the world. In the wake of our ignominious abandonment of Afghanistan, negotiated by Trump and implemented by Biden, has largely convinced a world that has already seen what happened in Vietnam and Iraq that the United States is a broken reed, an unreliable ally, a friend that can be counted upon only to abandon you when things get rough. There is no sheriff in town, so the guys in the black hats can run wild.

But the Xi and Putin gangs seem to have revived the appetite of the American people for realism and responsibility just a bit. Recent polls have shown pluralities of the American people favoring the use of force, if necessary, to defend Taiwan from China. And the Russian invasion of Ukraine has resulted in a heart-warming and reassuring reaction of sympathy for a smaller nation heroically resisting conquest by a far larger and far more powerful bully.

There is reason to hope that the American people are waking up again to the realization that a series of foolish, ill-considered, and mismanaged wars is a reason to avoid foolish, ill-considered, and mismanaged wars, not to retreat into Fortress America and hide our heads in the sand. It fills this aging neo-con’s heart with hope that we as a nation might yet regain its awareness of how small and interdependent a world we live in and the impossibility of America side-stepping the place in the world to which history has called us.

For centuries, each nation in Europe has sought to avoid any of the others becoming the dominant power on the continent. The development of the European Union is lessening that fear to some extent, but it still remains. If there is going to be a military and diplomatic alliance among the democracies of Europe to prevent the continent from being dominated by a paranoid, expansionist, and authoritarian Russia, it must be led by something relatively new in history: a great power linked culturally and economically to the nations of Europe but which is not itself a European nation. The domination of Europe by a hostile and paranoid Russia would be an economic and cultural disaster for the United States. And there simply is no other nation which, as a practical matter, can lead an alliance of Europe’s democracies than the United States.

Our economy is also deeply interconnected to the nations of the Pacific and the Middle East. A Pacific region dominated by China would be an economic disaster for the United States, and the democracies of Asia and the Pacific depend upon a uniquely powerful Pacific nation like America for leadership and support. And in the post-9/11 era, it’s hard to avoid the significance of the Middle East to American security even without considering the region’s oil. Vital American interests are at stake all over the world, and all over the world, circumstances place the United States in a unique position to lead the way to peace and stability.

Vladimir Putin would like to destroy NATO. Donald Trump would like to destroy NATO. Neither makes any bones about it, and we dare not allow that to happen. Nor can we retreat from the other great theatres of international events. The notion of a “Fortress America” in which events in other parts of the world can be safely ignored is a delusion, and a dangerous one.

The well-being of not only the United States but of the world itself is absolutely dependent on our adopting a posture of vigorous internationalism purged of the foolish and discredited concept of nation-building. Our foreign policy needs to be less ambitious than it was in the administration of the second Bush and of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. But our well-being as a nation and the welfare of the human race both hang upon our willingness to be intelligently aggressive in the pursuit of our interests and those of our allies up to and including, where necessary and as a last resort, the use of military force to pursue well-defined and prudently-conceived objectives.

So no more “nation-building.” But as the American people seem at long last to have realized once again, there is no corner of the world in which events are removed from America’s vital interests. Hopefully, the result will yet be the re-birth of a neo-conservatism purged of the idealistic notion of remaking the world in America’s image, but soberly determined to protect America’s interests. Our security, and that of the world, depend upon it.

This is an odd moment in our history. Both of our political parties, and especially the Republicans, are profoundly dysfunctional. That must change, or else a new party or parties will have to emerge. But the good news is that the hour of the neo-con has come again, and we are showing signs of regaining contact with geopolitical reality.

Was she thinking of Seinfeld’s ‘Soup Nazi?’

Not content with comparing the D.C. jail to the Gulag (has she ever read Solzhenitzen’s book or anything else about the Gulag?), Marjorie Taylor Green has accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of operating a “Gazpacho police.” Now, the Senate cafeteria is famous for its bean soup, but I’ve never associated the House with gazpacho. I doubt that anyone else has, either. Mona Charen saw a tweet today wherein someone wondered whether the Gazpacho operated in Vichysoisse France.

This is a member of Congress, folks. She compares an American city jail to a brutal series of concentration camps mostly above the Arctic Circle in which a cruel and inhuman regime worked and starved political dissidents to death (or did she mean to say that the D.C. jail is a goulash?), and then goes on to confuse the Gestapo- Hitler’s secret police- with a cold Spanish vegetable soup. I’m speechless, and very few things make me speechless. If only Rep. Greene, who regularly embarrasses herself, her constituents, the Republican party, and the nation, were speechless more often, it might be a good thing.

This is Donald Trump-level cluelessness, and that says a great deal. In the words of our last president in commemorating Bin Laden’s victims, “Never forget Seven-Eleven.” And as he also once reminded us, we should always remember and honor the heroic soldiers of the Continental Army, who courageously liberated the airfields from the British during the Revolutionary War.

The idiocracy is real.

You learn something new every day

Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on all charges by a Wisconsin jury tonight.

Thus we learn that one cannot be held accountable in this country for insinuating oneself into a riot, taking an assault rifle to the party, and going hunting for people you disagree with politically.

I very much believe in our system. But I have less and less confidence that the American people (or at least a large percentage of them) have the common sense of a radish. And I continue to wonder why such a large percentage of American adults continue to believe so passionately that it is fitting and proper in the midst of the most advanced society in history not only to play cowboys and Indians with real guns,
but to be safeguarded from accountability when one does so with blatant irresponsibility and clear disregard for what is absolutely guaranteed to happen as a result.

Are the American people capable of governing themselves in 2021? Honestly, I have real doubts.

A hard time to be a Cubs fan

My first trip to Wrigley Field, as I recall, was in 1957. I was seven years old. Dad took the whole family to the ball park for a double header with the Phillies which, if I remember right, we split.

Having watched baseball at Wrigley on TV for years (involuntarily; 1957 was the first year it actually caught my interest), I was in awe to see the place I’d watched in black-and-white for so long not only in living color but in person. I got a comparable thrill in my late 50s when the Cub coaches gave a hitting clinic for young fans before a game I attended, and I was allowed to fulfill a lifelong ambition and actually walk around on the field. Well, the outfield, anyway. It was amazing to see the place from the same perspective Billy Williams and “Moose” Moryn and Lee Walls and Andre Dawson had back in the day. When nobody was looking, I swiped a tile from the warning track. The idea was that if I ever proposed to the fanatical Cub fan I was dating back in Iowa, I would have it made into an engagement ring. It never happened, but it was a nice thought. I suspect that my ex-wife, though also a Cub fan, threw it away, still in the plastic sandwich bag I kept it in.

I was a Cub fan on the South Side. This was an interesting experience. Nearly all my schoolmates and the kids I played with were Sox fans. The aunt and uncle’s next-door neighbor was the engineer for the WCFL broadcasts of the White Sox games. When we went to visit Uncle Johnny and Aunt May every week, Mr. Swanson and I would always give each other a hard time. He got Dad and me into Comiskey Park one Saturday free to see the Sox play. I got a foul ball on the second pitch, and got to meet Sox owner Bill Veeck after the game. “So, son,” Veeck said. “Are you a Sox fan?” “Hell, no!,” I replied, or words to that effect. He threw back his head and laughed, as my embarassed father explained that he’d grown up across the street from the old Cubs Park on the West Side, where the team played before moving into Wrigley, and that Cub Hall of Fame catcher and manager Gabby Hartnett was a distant cousin of ours. They had a long talk about Veeck’s dad, who had owned the Cubs at one point. It was only later that it dawned on both of us that we’d forgotten to ask him to autograph the ball!

Sox fans hate the Cubs. It’s been said- and in many cases, I think it’s true- that given the choice between the Sox winning and the Cubs losing, Sox fans would prefer the latter. Part of the reason is class warfare. While working-class Chicagoans are divided in their allegience, generally depending on which side of Madison Street they live on, the Cubs have always been the more upscale of the two. There’s a story about a kid on the South Side who went to school one day wearing a Cubs can. “Why are you a Cubs fan?,” his Sox fan teacher asked. “Because my parent are,” he replied. “That’s not a good reason!,” she replied. “If your parents were a drug dealer and a prostitute, what would that make you?”

Without missing a beat, the kid replied, “A Sox fan?”

Wrigleyville is a neighborhood of small theatres, fashionable restaurants, and fern bars. It’s Yuppie heaven. Chicago’s affluent gay community is concenrated in the area of Wrigley Field. On the other hand, there used to be a tee-shirt that said, “I went to a game at Comiskey Park, and all I got was these bullet holes in my tee-shirt.”

Economics aside, Chicago has always been a Cubs town. The Cubs and the Sox have each won three World Series. The Sox have been in a grand total of six. The Cubs, on the other hand, have been in eleven. Historically, the North Siders have been a far more successful team. And of course, when Sox fans brag about having won a larger percentage of the World Series than the Cubs have, we point out that while we may have lost eight World Series, at least we’ve never thrown one.

Yeah. They play hard ball in this rivalry.

When the Sox won the pennant somehow in 1959, I was all set to root for the Dodgers in the Series. My dad talked me out of it. The Sox, he pointed out, were a Chicago team, and we should get behind them. So we rooted for the Sox. They lost.

Sox fans as a group, on the other hand, are traditionally jerks when the Cubs do well, and when the Sox got to the Series again in 1985 I rooted for the Astros. In 2006, when the Cubs played the Florida Marlins for the National League pennant, there were bars on the South Side where the drinks were on the house when the Marlins hit a home run. Sox fans, on the whole, hate the Cubs more than Cub fans hate the Sox. But there is no love lost either way.

I lived in the suburbs of St. Louis during the 1987, 1988, and 1999 seasons. I went to Busch Stadium just about every time the Cubs came to town (clergy get free general admission to Cardinals games). Each team won a division championship during that time, but the Cubs finished ahead of the Cards two of the three years I was there. Having been a Cub fan both on the South Side and in St. Louis, I can definitely say that I would rather be hated than patronized.

Cub fans tend to patronize Sox fans. We’ve certainly done a great job of patronizing them since 2015. Alas, while Theo Epstein managed to build our first world champion since my dad lived across the street from the old Cubs Park in 1908, he proved unable to maintain his success. I don’t know how much influence the financial fortunes of the Ricketts family had on his behavior, but we never did get a center fielder or a leadoff man to replace the departed Dexter Fowler after 2016. Gaping holes in the team went unaddressed for years; some of them have been there ever since. One of Theo’s personal rules was that the worst time to make a trade is when you have to, because it’s hard to negotiate well out of desperation.

It’s hard to object too hard about the one-year rental of closer Aroldis Chapman in 2016 even at the expense of prize prospect and future All-Star Gleyber Torres. After all, it’s doubtful whether we would have won the Series that year without Chapman. But when we sent Elroy Jiminez and Dylan Cease to the Sox for the mediocre Jose Quintana in a moment of desperation… well, in retrospect, there was no excuse. We squandered our impressive farm system without managing to repair the holes, and what we thought was going to be a dynasty turned out to be a one-and-done.

What remained of thr 2016 team was inconsistent and streaky. They struck out alot. They managed to win several division championships, but never got any further. And the Ricketts family was either unwilling or unable to spend the money to sign the available free agents, plug those holes, and get us back to the Series.

I’ve realized for a number of years that what happened this past week was necessary. The only way back to glory was to re-stock the farm system with prospects, and as much as Cub fans hate to admit this, the only way to get value in a trade is to give value. Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, and Javy Baez are among the most beloved players in Cub history. But each of them demanded more money in their new contracts than they were worth, money nobody is going to give them. That’s especially the case after the huge financial hit the Ricketts family took in their hotel business and other investments due to the COVID pandemic.

I love those guys, and I hate to lose them. I’ve actually had a couple of nightmares about the trades the last few nights. Like most Cub fans, I have a hole in my heart right now. I comfort myself with the strong chance that once he realizes that he isn’t going to get what he’s asking for elsewhere at least Rizzo will come back to the Cubs over the winter.

It hurts. But it was necessary. In place of the strikeout-prone El Mago, our shortstop will now be contact-hitter Nico Hoerner. As a result of the Kimbrel trade, we will have high-average contact hitter Nick Madrigal at second. These are exactly the kind of players the Cubs need. They will give us what Baez and Bryant did not: consistency. Future star Brenden Davis, an outfielder, will be coming up from Iowa to play at Wrigley next year. Pete Crow-Armstrong, the former first-round draft choice of the Mets who we got in the Baez deal, is another highly talented outfield prospect, as is Alexander Canario, a low-strikeout hitter whose mediocre batting average masks a stellar OBP. The Cubs have been addressing an area Theo neglected in the last rebuild- pitching- in recent years, and have a number of high-quality hurlers in the pipe. They got a couple more in this week’s trades. And Jason Heyward, who despite his defensive prowess has never lived up to his potential at the plate, will doubtless be gone after next year, taking his huge contract with him.

The wild-card in all of this is the improving financial situation of the Ricketts family and the amount of money they will save as a result of unloading Bryant, Baez, and Rizzo, and soon, Heyward. For the first time in years, the Cubs will be in a position to sign some free agents, perhaps including Rizzo. And taking that into consideration, given the improved look of the organization it won’t be many years before the Cubs are back on top. This rebuild will not take the ten years the last one did, or anything close to it. And this time, it won’t simply a matter of building a talented team. It will be a team built around contact hitters and offensive consistency, the very thing the Bryant/Baez era Cubs so conspicuously lacked.

In short, as depressed as Cub fans are right now, this had to happen. Perhaps it’s almost overdue. The remnants of the 2016 world champions were not going to win another world championship. Now the Cubs are doing what they have to do to build a team that can, and I truly don’t think it’s going to take that long.

But then, there’s the other thing.

I’ve never been exactly a fan of either New York team, but I’m still pulling for Rizzo and Baez. I have nothing in particular against the Giants; that rivalry cooled off decades before I was born. But I’m actively rooting for Kris Bryant. I doubt that more than one of them will be back, and I both expect and hope that it will be Rizzo.

I’m going to have a tougher time rooting for Kimbrel and Tempera. They weren’t part of the 2016 team, of course, and didn’t occupy the same place in our hearts Rizzo and KB and El Mago did. And they are, after all, playing for… that other team.

The shoe is on the other foot now. The Sox are well-situated for a run at another world championship, and will be for several years. The Cubs will be also-rans for at least a few years. That will be a hard to take as losing the Big Three this past week has been.

I’d find it easier to pull for the Sox if their fans weren’t such jerks about the Cubs. As it is, we’ll see what we will see. In the meantime. the Sox deserve their due. They’re a hell of a team, and despite their occasional obnoxiousness their fans deserve their turn to howl.

But before you know it, we’ll be back. The White Sox ascendency will only stoke the fire in our guts. So far, Chicago has only seen one Subway Series, in 1906. The Sox won that one in six games.

Here’s to a rematch sometime in the next five years. And a different outcome.

The agony of being a Blackhawk fan with Stan Bowman as GM

There is no planet in this or any galaxy in the known universe in which Seth Jones is worth Adam Boqvist and an eight-year contract totalling $77 million, let alone the draft choices my Blackhawks gave to Columbus in Stan Bowman’s latest genius-level trade. It’s kind of hard to rebuild without draft choices. This year alone, the Seth Jones trade cost us not only Boqvist, but three players more highly rated in the draft than the guy we took with the last pick in this year’s first round. And we will continue to hemorrhage future talent in drafts yet to come for a guy who may or may not be able to return to the level of play he showed himself capable of before last year.

Please, Rocky Wirtz. Fire Bowman now, before he ruins the team for a generation. I really want at least one more Stanley Cup before I die, and preferably more than one. We’re just not going to get there with this guy as GM.

Is China actually a paper tiger?

Just heard a very interesting podcast by Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark. It was interview with commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. Much of it is about the nature of fascism, and the degree to which that label can be accurately applied to the movement Donald Trump started and still heads. It’s worth listening to, if only to sharpen one’s own thinking about what fascism is and is not, and how it historically has functioned. Spoiler: both men agree that it actually has less to do with ideology or even policy than with style and attitude.

But the part of the interview I found the most interesting comes at the very end. Frum makes the case that China is, excuse the expression, a paper tiger. The Chinese, he argues, are not going to overtake the United States in any of the ways we fear. They’ve been faking their economic statistics for years. No university in China- not even Bejing University- ranks among the great universities of the world. You do not build great universities by putting shackles on the human mind.

The United States, and not China, continues to be the place from which new ideas and scientific discoveries come. Even their COVID vaccine doesn’t work as well as ours. Like the Soviet Union before it, China gives every indication of being a hollow shell, very big on appearances but more menacing in rhetoric and posturing than in fact.

I would argue that it’s still worth taking seriously. It’s the only nation in the world that even might rival us economically, militarily, or geopolitically. I would argue that we need to be taking Putin’s Russia seriously, too, even though it’s a less formidable threat. It may no longer be the superpower it once was, but it is neither the toothless relic Barak Obama seemed to think it was nor the cute, friendly puppy Donald Trump pretended. The Russian bear still has claws and teeth, and it is neither our friend nor the friend of freedom.

In any case, we seem to be losing our mojo. We, as a nation, seem to be resigned to decline and stagnation. Certainly we’re doing nothing ourselves to avoid that path. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” are used to advocate the abandonment of the very ideals that made our nation great in the first place. A large part of the American population and a great many of our leaders seem to have stopped believing in our country and its ideals. The very slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that it is not great at the moment. Many of our people and politicians want to run away from the world instead of engaging it, as if that were even an option in the 21st Century. We live in a post-truth society in which ignorance is weaponized for political purposes and what we want to believe seems to have a stronger influence on policy than what the evidence says is true.

But maybe it’s time to stop being so quick to believe it when other nations and even voices within our own borders with agendas of their own talk trash about the United States. The whole podcast is worth hearing. But that bit at the end is especially worth taking to heart.

It seems quite likely that rather than being the nation to whom the future belongs, China is, in Mao’s phrase, a “paper tiger.”

A covenant with death

From CPAC.

This is what conservatism has become: paranoid fantasies about life-saving vaccines and an active alliance with a deadly virus against humanity. Cheers for the fact that we have thus far failed in this country to vaccinate enough people to achieve herd immunity and put the pandemic behind us. The alliance with ignorance that lies at the heart of the Trump revolution has clearly and frankly become a covenant with death.

There is blood on these people’s hands, and no sane or decent person should have any illusions about it. To discourage people from being vaccinated, to keep the pandemic going, to stop us from reaching herd immunity, to give COVID a chance to mutate further and undo a golden opportunity to end a scourge that has killed over 600,000 Americans already is simply evil.

The issue when it comes to vaccination is not a mere difference of opinion. The anti-vax position is not simply an alternative viewpoint, any more than resistance to lockdowns, masks, and other common-sense public health measures were differences of opinon. Given the amount of misinformation the radical right has spread about COVID, the pandemic, and the vaccines, to be confused and a little hesitant is certainly understandable. But to actively promote that disinformation is barbaric.

Tens of thousands have already died unnecessarily because of the misinformation spread by these extremists. At this critical moment when COVID could be dealt a decisive blow and the pandemic put behind us, nobody should be confused about the fact that the product being sold by people like this guy is not merely confusion and ignorance, but death itself.

“Because it’s true!”

Seems that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, had a bit of a run-in with The Man a while back.

Barr describes Trump’s ongoing whine about last year’s election having been stolen from him as “bullshit.”

According to a book by ABC Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl entitled Betrayal and scheduled to be published in November, Barr says that his attitude toward Trump’s claims amounted to “put up or shut up time.” That, he says, is why he gave prosecutors the OK to investigate the claims and opened his own investigation.

“If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it,” Barr told Karl. “But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”

Trump claims that voting machines all over the country were somehow rigged to switch votes from himself to the man who defeated him, President Joe Biden.

“We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told Karl.

“It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy,” Barr added. And he’s exactly right. Trump and his followers to the contrary, the bottom line is that the technology to do what Trump claims was done with voting machines all over the country simply doesn’t exist, and even if it did, using it would have been absolutely impossible to conceal and incredibly easy to document. Yet Trump and his supporters have never been able to produce a single bit of evidence to substantiate his claims, and literally every court case he brought- even before judges Trump himself appointed- has been laughed out of court.

Barr also told Karl that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged him to speak out on Trump’s claims because they could hurt the Republican Party in the upcoming Senate runoff elections in Georgia and said that they were “bad” for both the party and the country. Karl says that McConnell confirmed the conversation when he asked him about it. McConnell apparently thought that maintaining the personal goodwill of Donald Trump was a higher priority than either the Republican Party’s prospect in Georgia or the welfare of the nation.

The way in which the nation’s Republican politicians, with rare exceptions, tremble before the wrath of the psychlogically unsound former president is an amazing thing. Apparently they are conscious of the degree to which the Republican rank and file buys into the Trump line no matter how outrageously he lies or how complete is the lack of evidence to support his claims.

Barr, who isn’t seeking elective office, faced no such constraints. But McConnell apparently believed that Trump’s support was vital in Georgia despite the damaging character of his bizarre claims about the election.

Apparently he found himself on the horns of a dilemma.“Look,” he told Barr, “we need the president in Georgia. And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”

“I understand that,” Barr replied, according to Karl. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”

When Trump heard about Barr’s statement that there was no evidence of fraud, the Former Guy demanded to know why Barr had said it. ,“How the f— could you do this to me?,” Trump demanded. “Why did you say it?”

Barr answered, “Because it’s true.”

Interestingly, Trump didn’t dispute the statement. Instead, referring to himself in the third person, he responded, “You must hate Trump. You must hate Trump.”

The disconnect between reality and the radical right where Donald Trump is concerned is one of the things that puzzles me the most about them. I’ve cited and documented evidence that Donald Trump was unfit to be President since before the Orange One was even nominated in 2016, and routinely had it ignored by his supporters and dismissed with the accusation, “You just hate Trump.” Statements of the simple, documented and established truth continue to be dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” And the sheer terror he strikes into the hearts of Republican politicians seems to have robbed them of any sense of duty to confront even lies they concede are hurting the country.

There can be no question but that Trump’s lies about the election have undermined his successor, damaged the country’s reputation abroad, and undermined the confidence of the American people in the integrity of our elections and of our most basic institutions. One wonders how long it will be before people like McConnell and other Republicans have enough, and put the welfare of the country ahead of their fear of an unstable demagogue.

They fear that if they do, they’ll be replaced by others who will have no compunctions about putting their loyalty to Trump ahead of their loyalty to the country. Perhaps. But one has to wonder how much worse off we would be in that case than we are now.