No Foul, No Harm

 

Vintage Space Jam T-shirt via.

I've been thinking about sports lately, partly no doubt because it's that one time in a quadrennium when I start following a sport myself with some assiduity (maybe should be twice in a quadrennium now that I've found out about the women's game), and wanting to say something about how Republican politics relates to sports, but it wasn't coming together until this remarkable series on Mark Meadows texts from the effort to overturn the 2020 election began coming out at Talking Points Memo, and then something Hilzoy said (Hilzoy is the philosopher Hilary Bok, one of the great bloggers until she quit blogging in 2009, and still a really valuable presence on Twitter) crystallized it for me:

... and the point is not to reflect people's actual will but to see whether, if you torture the rules badly enough, you can see, or pretend to see, a way that YOU can win.

— hilzoy (@hilzoy) December 14, 2022

For the Record: Last Thoughts on the Persecution of Peter Meijer

Studious fox, illumination by Master of Catherine of Cleves and Lieven van Lathem, ca. 1460, via Wikipedia.

Think I already RT'd the whole thread, but this point. Why is it our job to fix the GOP by elevating Meijer over Gibbs? How would that even work? Our job is to defeat the GOP by any legal means. It's just a lot more urgent now than it was in 1952. The party needs to fix itself. https://t.co/cjCNkQESuJ

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

... eventually armed revolt, not to mention talk of a constitutional convention designed to institutionalize minority rule), maybe then we can talk about negotiating a happy return to Queensberry days, if they ever existed.

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

GOP really has to abjure and abandon the project to establish the perpetual rule of the all-white all-authoritarian minority before we can work on a civility project instead. I'd love to see it but I'm not holding my breath.

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

We had top secret information, totally unknown to the GOP leadership, that the primary voters were the same, and when they saw the ad they would say, "Fuck yeah I want me some of that!"

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

"If not for those meddling Democratic ad buys I would have gotten away with it too!" Which is probably nonsense, it's doubtful the ad made that much of a difference, but it clearly shows how wicked and unethical Democrats are.

— Woke Mob Against Climate Destruction (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2022

Sanger Confesses: Tipped Scales for Ignoramus Candidate

Drawing by Jim Morin, May 16, for the Miami Herald, via.

I wish I was kidding: The Times's David Sanger, writing today about that bizarre interview he and Haberman conducted with Trump in March:

To Mr. Trump, the Iran deal was not only misguided, but also badly negotiated. “They should’ve walked,” he said of Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. Mr. Trump said he would have left the negotiating room, doubled down on sanctions, and never agreed to give back billions of dollars, money that belonged to Iran and was frozen in American financial institutions.

But when pressed, he struggled to name any part of the deal he would have walked out of the negotiations to alter. With some prompting, he finally settled on a common critique: that after 15 years, Iran will be free to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium again, in any quantity.

Make that "with a lot of prompting". And a great deal more prompting afterwards that didn't yield anything they could use for their article.

I didn't really notice it at the time, because in the first place it was obvious to me that he didn't know anything whatsoever about what was in the JCPOA with Iran or how it worked but simply kept denouncing it as bad because that sounded right to him and his audiences, but Sanger was working in the interview to make Trump sound not like an idiot. Now he tells us, after the election, it was fixed so the average reader wouldn't notice how ignorant Trump actually is. I don't think Sanger realizes that himself.

Townhall hates situational ethics

Scare quotes say it all, don't they? From a PowerPoint showing how every time somebody tells a lie in the Old Testament there's some excuse for it but lying is never justified. Missing Genesis 2:15 to 3:5, where YHWH falsely tells Adam the fruit of the tree of knowledge is a poison that will kill him within 24 hours and the Serpent calls him on it.

Townhall is touting a new Pew poll with the following headline:

Pew: “Only 15% of the Public Thinks That Having an Abortion is Morally Acceptable”

Well, hm. That's actually 38% who believe that having an abortion is either (a) morally acceptable or (b) not a moral issue at all. Still, 49% say that abortion is [jump]