Posted on May 24, 2013 by John Hinderaker in Media Bias, Social Issues, Sports

When Did the Sports Pages Get More Liberal Than the News?

Most of us read a newspaper’s sports pages for a respite from the generally depressing news of the day, and there was once a time when we could even expect a conservative outlook from most sports reporters. But those days are long gone. For some reason, today’s sportswriters are, if anything, farther to the left than their brethren in the news room. Moreover, some of the most obnoxious, far-left news reporters are former sports writers.

Which brings us to gay marriage. Here in Minnesota, gay marriage has been a contentious issue. Last year, there was a pro-traditional marriage amendment on the ballot. It failed, and a week or two ago, our Democrat-controlled legislature enacted a law recognizing gay marriage. During the 2012 campaign, a punter for the Minnesota Vikings, Chris Kluwe, was an outspoken advocate of same-sex marriage. He gave speeches, appeared on television, and so on. Our sports reporters unanimously applauded him for his “courage,” but why, since he received nothing but applause for his outspoken stance?

Kluwe was an expensive, aging punter, and the Vikings drafted a punter and released him. Which brings us to today’s most clicked-on story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Adrian Peterson was asked about gay marriage.

Peterson, unlike Kluwe, is a superstar, the best running back in the NFL. But why his views on gay marriage should be newsworthy is a mystery. Nevertheless, the subject came up when he was interviewed on SiriusXM NFL Radio. This is how the Star Tribune breathlessly reported the interview:

[W]hen asked about the Vikings’ release of punter Chris Kluwe earlier this month, Peterson didn’t steer around the obligatory request for comment on Kluwe’s activism in favor of gay rights and marriage equality.

When a sportswriter refers to “marriage equality” with a straight face you know where he is coming from.

Said the reigning league MVP: “To each his own. I’m not with it. But I have relatives that are gay. I’m not biased towards them. I still treat them the same. I love them. But again, I’m not with that. That’s not something I believe in. But to each his own.”

That is about as mild a comment on gay marriage as you can imagine; yet, Peterson failed to toe the party line. He continued by praising Chris Kluwe:

I’m sure the Vikings organization did not release him based on that. They know Kluwe. They’ve been knowing him for a long time. And they know he’s outspoken. But it hurt me to see him leave. He was a good friend of mine and a really cool guy, man. Probably one of the smartest guys I’ve ever been around, man. Different.

Here, Peterson echoed the unanimous press line on Kluwe–he was extraordinarily brilliant, once he came out in favor of gay marriage, despite having been known mostly as a video gamer until then. However, while Kluwe’s enthusiastic endorsement of “marriage equality” was entirely uncontroversial and unanimously praised, Peterson’s mild demurrer–”to each his own”–strikes our local sports reporter as subversive, even dangerous:

Is it outrageous for Peterson to speak candidly on the gay marriage topic? No. Is it a bit dangerous, potentially stirring up an unwanted storm? Absolutely.

The reporter puts Peterson’s comments in the context of recent news stories:

The topic of acceptance and tolerance of gay athletes has been on the front burner recently, particularly after NBA big man Jason Collins came out last month, becoming the first pro athlete in any of the four major sports to reveal his homosexuality while still active.

For what it’s worth, Collins’s career is at its end, and if he catches on with an NBA team next year, it will likely be as a result of his “coming out.”

Collins’ announcement generated an impressive wave of support. But the question still looms as to just how ready a men’s professional sports locker room is for an openly gay player. If and when the first NFL player follows Collins’ lead and reveals his homosexuality, how will that be accepted?

Peterson’s remarks hint at some of the hurdles that remain.

Really? Note how any distinction between being indifferent to a teammate’s sexual practices and supporting gay marriage is casually obliterated. Peterson addressed the latter issue, and said nothing about the former, apart from the fact that he “loves” his gay relatives and is “not biased toward them.” But that isn’t good enough: in the world of today’s sports journalism, enthusiastic endorsement of homosexuality and gay marriage is the only non-controversial–heck, non-hateful–option. Our reporter concludes with this bit of condescension:

Yes, Peterson remains one of the NFL’s true good guys, a likeable superstar, who was also the Vikings Community Man of the Year in 2012. He is at once down to earth and giving of his time. And in his interview with Murray and Toomer, he made clear his intentions to deliver financial aid and a personal helping hand to the tornado ravaged parts of Oklahoma, where he went to college.

And no, Peterson’s answer to the Kluwe question doesn’t register as malicious or overtly intolerant. But it will almost certainly become a source of debate.

Got that? If you don’t toe the pro-gay marriage line, you are presumptively malicious and intolerant–in Peterson’s case, the sportswriter admits, not “overtly” so. This is the kind of biased, mindless claptrap that we expect from newspaper editorialists. Why on God’s green Earth do we have to put up with it in the sports pages?

Posted on by John Hinderaker in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals

Al Franken Resists Impulse to Slug Reporter

This video of Jason Mattera trying to interview Al Franken and Chuck Schumer about their two letters to the IRS, asking the agency to crack down on tax-exempt “social welfare” groups, is pretty entertaining. Only I don’t think Breitbart TV, which posted the video, described it correctly. Breitbart wrote:

Sen Al Franken (D-MN) was using such a circuitous “serpentine” walking pattern in an effort to avoid TRN’s Jason Mattera’s tough question that he inadvertently body checked one of his own staffers in the process.

I think Franken body-checked Mattera, not his aide, and it was clearly intentional. Franken has an anger management problem. He has been known to get into fist fights or wrestling matches with people who disagree with him about politics, and at the 2004 Republican convention he very nearly engaged in fisticuffs with Laura Ingraham’s producer–an altercation which I photographed. The picture was used in a Norm Coleman ad during their epic 2008 campaign. It looked to me as though Franken could barely resist mixing it up with Mattera. Schumer, on the other hand, ignored him completely. Here is the video:

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in Baseball

This day in baseball history

On May 24, 1963, the first place San Francisco Giants took on the second place Los Angeles Dodgers at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. It had taken a dramatic playoff series (won by the Giants) to separate the two teams in 1962, and well into the 1963 season, they were separated by only one game.

To add to the drama, the pitching matchup featured Sandy Koufax for the visitors and Juan Marichal for the home team. Coming into the game, Koufax was 6-1 with a 1.06 ERA. Marichal’s record was 5-3 with a 3.00 ERA.

Neither pitcher had won 20 games in a season yet, but everyone understood that Koufax (late-blooming at age 27) was a dominant pitcher; only an injury had prevented him from fully displaying that dominance in 1962. And most close observers recognized that Marichal (age 25, with a 18-11 record in 1962) was on the verge of dominance.

However, dream pitching matchups don’t always pan out. Earlier in May, when Koufax pitched a no-hitter against the Giants, Marichal failed to hold up his end of the deal. The Dodgers pounded out 4 runs and 9 hits against him in less than 6 innings.

This time, Koufax failed even more spectacularly than Marichal had. The great lefty retired only one Giant in the first inning and was charged with 5 runs (all earned), 5 hits, and 2 walks. The key blows were by Orlando Cepeda (a two-run double) and Felipe Alou (a two-run homer).

As a result of this battering, Koufax’s ERA would balloon from 1.07 to 1.71. At season’s end, the ERA was 1.88, and Koufax had won 25 wins with only 5 losses.

Marichal made easy work of the Dodgers on this day. He pitched a complete game, allowing 1 run on 4 hits.

Marichal finished the season at 25-8 with a 2.41 ERA. That’s easily good enough for the Cy Young award in most years, but clearly not in the National League of 1963.

What about other Koufax-Marichal matchups? Actually, there were surprisingly few. My research found only 4 of them during the six-and-a-half years in which both played. There were many, many more between Marichal and the great Don Drysdale. Coincidence? I don’t know.

The Giants and Dodgers split these 4 games. In a fifth encounter, Marichal came on in relief to defeat Koufax.

Only two of the 4 games head-to-head duels were close — a 4-3 Dodger win in 1961 and a 4-3 Giant win in 1965.

Even so, I’d pay big bucks to be transported back in time to witness any of these games, especially the Koufax no-hitter.

NOTE: This post has been modified slightly from the original version.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in National Security, Obama administration, Terrorism

Americans are tired; Obama is tired — but not of the same thing

President Obama’s legendary intellectual dishonesty was on full display once again in his “The Future of our Fight Against Terrorism” address. In essence, the speech called for a pullback, if not an end to, the “war” on terrorism. He prefaced this call with a quote from James Madison: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” And he pushed it home by emphasizing the duration of the “war” and the resulting national weariness.

Yet until yesterday, Obama didn’t especially like to speak about our confrontation with terrorism as a “war.” Indeed, even the title of yesterday’s speech refers to it as a “fight.” But in the body of the speech, it was a war.

Why the pivot? Because “war” is an easy target. For one thing, it lends itself to quotations such as the one above from James Madison that have no applicability to our struggle against terrorism. Or does Obama believe, as the Code Pink lady who interrupted him does, that we are losing our freedom as a result of the war on terrorism as he has carried it out?

More importantly, Obama knows the nation is “war weary.” By pivoting to the war metaphor, Obama hopes to parlay that weariness into the termination of policies that make him, but not most Americans, weary.

It’s vintage Obama: identify a linguistic commonality between left-wing dogma and mainstream thinking — here “war weariness” — and through shameless punning — here of the word “war” — try to make left-wing dogma seem mainstream. You could argue that Obama’s political success is based, more than anything else, on this form of dishonesty.

Yes, Americans are weary of shooting wars like the one we fought in Iraq and the one we are winding down in Afghanistan. But they are not weary of holding hard-core terrorists at Gitmo. And they are not weary of killing terrorists at no cost in American lives through drone strikes. Nor is there any evidence that they are weary of deploying forces at bases near potential trouble spots so that our forces can respond to attacks against U.S. interests more effectively than the Obama administration did in Benghazi.

In short, war weariness can justify ending the two shooting wars we’ve fought since 9/11 (which is a done deal) and not participating in new wars in places like Syria. But it cannot justify the scale-back in the fight against terrorism that Obama now has in mind.

It is only Obama and the hard-left that is weary of detaining terrorists indefinitely. It is only Obama and the hard-core left that is weary of drone strikes.

Nor can rhetoric about preserving our freedom justify a scale-back in the struggle against terrorism. Our freedom is threatened by IRS abuses and pretextual harassment of journalists — not by detaining foreign terrorists or using drones against them.

Obama didn’t become president so he could protect America against terrorists — that mission is too pedestrian and perhaps too parochial. He doesn’t enjoy being a war president, even in the limited sense that he still is one. And, to his credit, Obama doesn’t relish signing off on targeted killings. Thus, now that he doesn’t have to worry about another election, he wants to back off.

But being president isn’t just about doing what one wants. If Obama lacks the stomach to continue his popular and often successful first term efforts against terrorism, he should either have told Americans so during the election campaign or bowed out of office.

But how can we expect honesty from a man who has built a hugely successful career on dishonesty?

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Beauty pageants, Second Amendment

A Second Amendment Celebration

One of my favorite Facebook groups is “2nd Amendment Hotties,” and apparently more than a few other people like it too, as it has something like 16,000 “likes” on FB.  Would seem an omission not to share some of its awesomeness with Power Line readers, especially since we’re still in a too-long hiatus of beauty pageants worthy of John’s coverage.  So enjoy this respite from scandalmania for a holiday Friday.

Posted on by Steven Hayward in Diversity, Political correctness, Race and racial bias

When “Diversity” = Hate

If memory serves, Irving Kristol once remarked that the term “peace,” as it was used by the left, “is a Stalinist concept,” since the intent of the so-called “peace movement” was the unilateral disarmament of the West and the triumph of Communism.  Today the term “diversity” works the same way: it has become a term meaning the opposite of its dictionary meaning, and is a vehicle for racial division and resentment.

Charlotte Allen writes splendidly in the Weekly Standard about “white privilege” conferences where Orwell would be astounded to find that the hate sessions go for a lot longer than the two minutes prescribed in 1984.  Needless to say, the lack of irony is evident in the very fact of such conferences, for who is more “privileged” these days than academics and activists who can travel to these hootenannies where the registration fee alone is $435.  But good for Charlotte; my experience, having long ago attended similar preposterous round-robins of radical resentment, is that the worst thing you can do is simply report what is said.  Like mushrooms, these kinds of lefty hate-ins flourish best in the dark.

But if you needed fresh evidence, check out this story out of Northwestern University, where a white student was rejected for a diversity appointment because “he is a white heterosexual male.”  The student’s name, incidentally, is Stephen Piotrkowski.  Just a hunch here, but he sounds like someone with immigrant roots that don’t trace back to the Anglosphere, and as such would represent what ought to be meant by “diversity” if it was meant seriously.  (Turns out his sister is gay, but that’s apparently not enough.)  But pigment is everything for the diversity-haters.

Posted on by Paul Mirengoff in Immigration, Marco Rubio, Media Bias

Fox News trots out Rubio to promote amnesty once again

I have written before about the lack of expression of opposition to the Schumer-Rubio amnesty legislation on leading Fox News programs such as Sean Hannity’s. While amnesty opponents receive little or no air time, Marco Rubio appears fairly regularly with Hannity to field mostly softball questions.

Now comes word that Rubio will appear tonight on a “special edition” of Hannity to field questions from an audience of experts on immigration. Will Rubio really be subjected to tough questioning from opponents of Schumer-Rubio? Or is will the format be rigged to enable Rubio to swat down a few watered-down objections and always get the last word?

We’ll see. But given the fact that, to my knowledge, Rubio has never actually debated anyone on Fox, I fear that this is just another set-up.