Tag Archives: responsibilities

Character and—and in—Sports

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I don’t often write about professional sports, but here goes.

Former Major League Baseball Commissioner .Fay Vincent has decried the role character plays in the selection of players to MLB’s Hall of Fame.

By trying to inject nobility into its election standards the Hall of Fame aimed to maintain the old-fashioned view that honors should accrue to the honorable.

Because honor is so 18th century. Never mind what Benjamin Franklin and John Adams thought was necessary to preserve our republic, then or now.

A letter writer in last Friday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal agrees with the commissioner.

I agree with Mr Vincent. Character should not be the overriding factor, which it recently seems to be. Voting should be based on merit.

Merit must also, and always, include character. If not, then why are the members of the Black Sox baseball team not in baseball’s Hall of Fame? After all, they had the skills and talent required for Hall of Fame membership; they had to be bought off in order for another team to win a World Series.

It’s Appropriate

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Senate Majority Whip and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D, IL) says it’s entirely appropriate to select a Supreme Court Justice first on the basis of her race and gender. He then says,

If they have achieved the level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence, they’ve done it against great odds.

We’ll never know whether that’s true of President Joe Biden’s (D) nominee, though, since he’s made plain he’ll nominate on the basis of race and sex, and not on the basis of any level of success in the practice of law and jurisprudence.

But this degree of racism, much less of sexism, shouldn’t be a surprise from a party with a history of racist bigotry stretching back into the pre-Civil War years and today whose racist and sexist bigotry is demonstrated through Party’s insistence on proselytizing its identity politics.

As a side note, Durbin also justifies his President’s racist and sexist choice criteria on the claim that other Presidents did it, too. There’s the concept of morality with which we’re so familiar in the Progressive-Democratic Party and its predecessor, the Democratic Party: the morality of a behavior isn’t at all intrinsic in the behavior; on the contrary, morality is rooted in whether somebody else behaved that way, too; morality is a matter of situation, of what’s personally convenient to the behaver.

A Misunderstanding

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board had a piece about Justice Stephen Breyer’s impending retirement last Wednesday. One bit in it caught my eye.

Like many liberals of his generation, he [Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer] is an institutionalist who believes in the promise of the Constitution and incremental social improvement.

And herein lies the fundamental misunderstanding of liberal judges regarding their role as judges. A judge cannot both believe in the promise of the Constitution and act on the premise of incremental social improvement.

Acting on social improvement, incremental or otherwise, is a strictly political matter and is solely the province of the political actors—Congress and We the People who hire those actors.

If a judge believes in the promise, he must adhere solely to his duty to apply the statute(s) and Constitution that are before him in any case. If he acts on those views of social improvement—which views are inherently his personal views—he is violating both Article I, Section 1, of our Constitution and his oath as a judge to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

A President’s Legacy

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With Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s impending retirement, President Joe Biden (D) has an opportunity. Unfortunately, he’s about to abuse it badly, to the detriment of our nation and to his legacy.

Biden has a chance to follow through on a campaign promise to appoint a Black woman to the court.

Biden has a chance to keep a racist and sexist campaign promise. What a legacy to leave behind.

Right up there with the blatantly racist Woodrow Wilson.

NBC and “Perspective”

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NBC now says they’ll provide geopolitical context along with their coverage of the upcoming olympics [sic] doings in the People’s Republic of China.

…our coverage will provide perspective on China’s place in the world and the geopolitical context in which these Games are being held.

Tellingly, that claim comes only after prodding by members of Congress.

Sure, though. NBC will provide every syllable of the perspective the PRC government tells it to. And not a syllable else.

I’ll not be watching NBC while Beijing’s olympics are going on. Not during the coverage. Not during any other part of those days and weeks.

I’ve also lost interest in the actual Olympics, summer or winter, as they’re currently run and as long as the incumbent managers remain in place. The International Olympics Committee, and the US part of that, the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee, have shown where their values are. I don’t approve of the PRC’s genocide. At best, the IOC and USOPC don’t care about the PRC’s genocide.