Right Wing Nut House

USA forwards Jozy Altidore and Charlie Davies celebrate Altidore’s goal against Spain on Wednesday. The shocking victory over the world’s #1 team propelled the US side into the finals of the Confederation Cup - a warm-up for next summer’s World Cup - in South Africa.

This article was first published on 6/28/09

I know I am going against the grain by being a soccer fan in America. But I really can’t help myself. Perhaps it’s because I’m a baseball fan that I appreciate the patience demonstrated by good teams, or the delicious feeling of watching the build up on offense, the teamwork on defense, and the great individual skills on display.

Alas, the American game rarely rises to the level found in much of Europe, South America, and other soccer crazy meccas where people live, eat, drink, and die with their national teams success or failure. But for 93 glorious minutes on Wednesday, it did.

The USA national team played the mighty Spaniards with their 35 match unbeaten streak in a Confederation Cup semi-final match this past Wednesday, and with a combination of making the most of their chances, good defense, and a large dollop of simple, dumb, luck, our boys pulled off the biggest upset in world soccer since we beat the Columbians at the World Cup in 1994. The 2-0 victory pushed the Americans into the finals against otherworldly Brazil - a team we lost to early in the tournament by the lopsided, embarrassing score of 3-0.

Expect a similar result today. The skill level, teamwork, and experience of the Brazilians is just awesome and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the game knows the US doesn’t have a prayer.

Of course, they said the same thing before America’s game with Spain. But playing the green and yellow and defeating them would take another miracle courtesy of the Soccer Gods. And everyone knows the Gods are all ex-Brazil greats, deified by their fanatical supporters while still on earth.

I’ve heard the arguments why the “World’s Game” has never caught on here and I’m sure you can recite them along with me. But here’s a clueless fellow who ascribes our lack of enthusiasm for soccer as a result of our basic political beliefs:

Watching the game, one could not have been happier for a team that has not really performed all that well in recent years or, for that matter, in the first few games of this tournament. Indeed, in the first two games, the U.S. was hammered by Italy and Brazil and only got into the semifinal match by beating Egypt and the fluke of a very arcane scoring system that soccer uses to break ties among teams. And even in this game, a neutral observer would have said that Spanish players clearly outplayed the Americans, outshooting the U.S. squad by a margin of 20 shots on goal. As the U.S. goalkeeper and star of the game Tim Howard noted afterwards, “Sometimes football is a funny thing.”

Well, yes, it is. As someone who didn’t play soccer growing up, but had a dad who did and whose own kids played as well, I can say unquestionably that it is the sport in which the team that dominates loses more often than any other major sport I know of. Or, to put it more bluntly, the team that deserves to win doesn’t. For some soccer-loving friends, this is perfectly okay. Indeed, they will argue that it’s a healthy, conservative reminder of how justice does not always prevail in life.

Well, hooey on that. And, thankfully, Americans are not buying it. In spite of the fact that one can drive by an open field on Saturdays and usually see it filled with young boys and girls playing soccer, the game’s popularity has not moved anywhere toward being a major sport here in the United States. It’s grown for sure but not close to where folks once expected it to be given the number of youth that have played the game over the past two decades.

For sure, there may be a number of reasons that is the case but my suspicion is that the so-called “beautiful game” is not so beautiful to American sensibilities. We like, as good small “d” democrats, our underdogs for sure but we also still expect folks in the end to get their just desert. And, in sports, that means excellence should prevail. Of course, the fact that is often not the case when it comes to soccer may be precisely the reason the sport is so popular in the countries of Latin America and Europe.

Gary Schmitt of AEI is a clueless git. First of all, that “arcane” scoring system which allowed the US to advance is a series of tie breakers (just like the NFL), although the criteria in this case was total number of goals (USA had 4 to Italy’s 3). How much less bizarre is it for an NFL team who goes 9-7 and wins their division to make the playoffs while a couple of 10-6 teams miss the postseason because their division winner had a better record? “Excellence” being rewarded? Phooey!

The only thing “arcane” about Schmitt is his reasoning.

Then there’s the utter malarkey that many teams that dominate the game stats wise or just have the better of the play usually lose. Again, let’s look at the NFL and notice that on any given Sunday, there are several teams who are out gained on offense, outplayed on defense, but catch a few lucky breaks and win the game. It is obvious Schmitt is not a sports fan if he thinks that such happenstances are uncommon.

As in football, the team with a lead in soccer will play it safe, usually dropping a couple of players back from midfield in order to prevent the other team from organizing an effective offense. This will invariably lead to the team that is behind having much the better of the play. Also, the leading team will push forward fewer players on the counterattack. The result is exactly as Schmitt describes but the reason is not because of any particular flaw in the game as much as it is a deliberate choice by the team that is ahead. Of course Spain took 20 more shots on goal. They were behind for almost the entire game. How many NFL teams have we seen build up a big lead in the first half and basically coast the rest of the way? His criticism is nonsense to anyone who knows anything about sports.

But that’s the problem in America. I think in order to love the game, you must be familiar with at least some of its nuances and strategies. There is a method to much of the madness the casual fan might see on the field and what looks like a lot of running around is actually a purposeful offense — probing for weakness, switching the play from one side of the field to the other to exploit an advantage, the give and go, and the teamwork involved in knowing where your teammates are on the field all the time are all practiced repeatedly by good teams in order to break down a defense and create a chance to score.

Defense is the loveliest of dances - a synchronized ballet where defenders react to where the ball is on the field and move almost in unison to block the assault. If you’ve only watched the game on TV, you can be forgiven for not being able to see much of this. And if you’ve only watched American soccer - the MSL variety - you don’t see much of it anyway. The American club league is an inferior product which helps explains to the Schmitt’s of the world why soccer hasn’t caught on here.

Legendary English football writer Steven Wells (who just died last week) saw the ugliness of what he terms “soccerphobes” in this Guardian piece from January of this year:

Meet radio show host Jim Rome. Jim - a short man with a Village People biker moustache - is the pope of soccerphobia. “My son is not playing soccer, ” promises Jim. “I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequinned blouse before I hand him a soccer ball.” Jim’s soccerphobia is part of a grand tradition of crassly xenophobic, casually homophobic, tediously sexist and smugly pig-ignorant soccer-bashing in mainstream American sports journalism. As Sport Illustrated’s soccer-friendly Alexander Wolff put it: “There isn’t a US daily without a ’soccer stinks’ beat guy”.

“Their mania is in direct proportion to their insecurity,” laughs Miguel Almeida, a New York-based soccer writer. “Hence its intensity. And the phenomenon pops up every time the World Cup rolls around, its reappearance as certain as swarming locusts.”

Not all soccer-haters are cliché-recycling hacks. Meet (right-wing) intellectual think-tanker Stephen Moore. “I am convinced,” writes Stephen, “that the ordeal of soccer teaches our kids all the wrong lessons in life. Soccer is the Marxist concept of the labour theory of value applied to sports - which may explain why socialist nations dominate the World Cup.”

Now before you dismiss Mr Moore as an isolated and irrelevant know-nothing right-wing bollock-talker, have a listen to his fellow Washington conservative, Mr John Derbyshire: “The very inconclusiveness of soccer is, I suspect, what has made it the pet sport of the repulsive [left-wing] bobos.”

OK, but two soccer-hating American gobshites do not a sinister right-wing conspiracy make. So here’s Jay Nordlingerm who claims soccer is “a project of the left, the athletic equivalent of vegetarianism”. This bile is echoed in the letters pages of America’s newspapers: “Soccer’s slow strangulation of real sports like football needed to be stopped,” rages a reader of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “High school football programs around the country have nearly succumbed to the foreign-sports terrorism known as soccer … Young minds and bodies are being wasted by continuing the slide into the soccer abyss.”

Schmitt isn’t that bad but it begs the question; is there a political element to people’s hate of soccer?

If there is, I don’t feel it. I enjoy the game as a sports fan. Hell, I even enjoyed watching the Afghan national game Buzkashi. And that’s because there are certain universal elements to sports and competition that make watching soccer or baseball, or any other game where athletes perform and teams compete to win such a joy. “The human drama of athletic competition” was part of the opening of the old ABC Wide World of Sports that featured every kind of game under the sun including Irish hurling, Australian rules football, and something as tame as curling.

I don’t see politics or underlying political truths in games and those who do are trying too hard. The loons who wail about football or hockey being too violent or teaching our kids the wrong life lessons are no different. Concentrate on the stellar athletes - the human body in motion is enormously pleasing to watch when it is done by those born with the grace and strength to play the game - any game - at the highest level. The desire to win, the sacrifices for the team; it is the same in any game and says more about our basic humanity than it does about any silly political generality made up by partisans who wish to score points against their enemies.

Not everyone likes football. More do not like soccer. But if you are ambivalent about the game, tune in to this afternoon’s USA-Brazil match. The Americans might get creamed. But if you want an idea of what soccer is really all about, watch the play of the Brazilians.

You just might discover what many Americans and most of the rest of the world, like about the game.

I am open to alternative explanations, but this story from Jake Tapper about Admiral Allen and the White House not knowing about the manufacturer in Maine who could manufacture 3 million feet of absorbent boom a month is a consequence of an almost total lack of private sector experience in Obama’s cabinet.

TAPPER: I talked to a guy who runs a company in Maine that offers boom, and he has – he says – the ability to make 90,000 feet of boom a day. High quality. BP came there 2 weeks ago, looked at it, they are doing another audit today. He is very frustrated, he says he has a lot of high quality boom to go and it is taking a long time for BP to get its act together. Don’t you need this boom right now?

ALLEN: Oh we need all the boom wherever we can get it. If you give me the information off camera I’ll be glad to follow up.

TAPPER: Florida emergency officials were upset a couple nights ago because oil was hitting Florida and parts of the ocean there were shut off and nobody had told emergency officials in Florida — what happened?

ALLEN: Well, I think we need to understand that we’ve got oil potentially spreading from South Central Louisiana to the Panhandle of Florida. And what used to be very large quantities of oil that came to the surface have now been disaggregated sometimes in very small quantities. And not all of them are going to be surveilled, and there will be oil coming ashore. Our attempt is to skim as much of that offshore as possible, but I’m not going to tell anybody in this country there’s not going to be some oil come ashore from time to time.

Morrissey asks the right question; aren’t these guys supposed to know stuff like this? It was all over the internet a week ago but beyond that, if they’re short of boom - and they say that’s one of the problems - isn’t someone responsible for compiling a list of businesses that make the stuff? Shouldn’t they be calling every single one of them asking them for every foot of boom they can get?

Either this is the greatest environmental disaster in history or its not. If it is, it appears to me that the White House is missing the boat. I don’t believe it’s because they are necessarily “incompetent” whatever that means. With only 3 cabinet heads who have any private sector experience - the fewest in modern history - I believe it likely that the idea that the private sector could help them if only they could bring themselvesto think out side the box just never crossed their minds.

And I wouldn’t be the first to point out that Allen seems a bit deferential to BP. The point being, while I’m sure there is major disagreement among experts about the extent of the problem and what to do about it, do others get the same impression that I do - that what is really lacking in this operation is a decisiveness, a firm hand? I’m not talking about technical means to close the hole but the ways and means of mitigating the effect of the spill. This thing with the booms is exhibit A of what I’m talking about. If you were responsible for protecting the coast and was short of boom, wouldn’t the first thing you would do is hit the internet and google up companies that make the stuff?

Sure, I’m probably oversimplifying, and we can never know all that is going on behind the scenes. But this story is worrying on several different levels, including the lack of communication with state officials in Florida. I’ve been watching government for a long time and I can tell you that it just seems to me that too many things are falling through the cracks, or not getting done, or the team is behind the curve. This bespeaks a lack of decisiveness. When it happens in war, as it did during the Bush years, young men die. When it happens in a disaster of this proportion, the Gulf coast may never be the same in my lifetime.

My latest article is up at PJ Media and in it, I address a question that I’ve looked at before; why aren’t Americans interested in soccer?

A sample:

But leaving politics aside, the reason that soccer has not arrived (and may never rise) to the first tier of professional sports in America is tradition and timing. There is no American soccer “tradition” as there is in baseball and football. Even basketball enjoys a tradition far beyond any national memories we have of American soccer.

Couple that with the fact that the sports calendar is crowded enough as it is, and the addition of another sport is just not practical. The MLS has adapted to the marketplace, largely abandoning the huge football stadiums and settling in smaller, more intimate venues like the Chicago Fire’s Toyota Park in Bridgeport, Illinois, that seats 20,000, or the 27,000-seat Home Depot Center in Carson, California, that hosts Los Angeles Galaxy games. While not exactly thriving, the league is mostly keeping its head above water and now serves as a legitimate feeder league for national team talent.

Salaries are not extravagant. Most importantly, several teams have deals with some of the club teams in Europe where they can “loan” their players out. This has led to some key national team members like Landon Donovan getting invaluable experience playing against the top players in the world.

That experience may be the key to the hopes of this year’s national squad. Where in 1994, only two or three national team members had experience in Europe, the 2010 edition of Team USA features several bona fide international standouts. Most of the others perform as serviceable pros in some of the top leagues in Europe.

Reading the comments, I am struck by the political tack most commenters take in opposition to the game. I find most political arguments against the game horsecrap - ignorant people trying to sound intelligent. It’s a monumental stretch to ascribe most American’s difficulty with the game to some ridiculous notion that soccer is a “collectivist” game played by namby-pamby Europeans.

This is posited by idiots who’ve never seen the English Premier League. Those guys don’t wear 20 pounds of pads but the collisions in the air and on the field are pretty violent. Also, try getting kicked in the shin by a soccer boot. Even with shin guards it hurts like a sonofabitch.

They are tough as nails, talented athletes with tremendous skills. And as far as the game being “collectivist,” that’s nonsense. American football is a truly collectivist game, modeled after one of the most collectivist activities man undertakes; war.

My own belief is that it takes a familiarity with the game, an understanding of its nuances, its ebb and flow, in order to appreciate it. There is a method to what appears to be the meanderings of players on the field and once you understand the complexities of the offensive buildup, the counterattack, the D-backs overlapping, the midfield attack, and the beautiful dance that defenses must employ to blunt the other team’s offense, the game can be enjoyed as any team sport.

Since there is no soccer tradition in America, there is no passing down this kind of knowledge as there is in baseball or football. Watch one of those games with a 5 or 6 year old kid and the questions never stop. Some are cutesy queries, but most are geared toward understanding the nuances of the game. Imparting that knowledge from generation to generation is how those sports maintain their huge fan base. If you want to be a soccer fan. you pretty much have to figure it out on your own.

It helps that I’ve been watching the game for almost 50 years. And it helps that I began to really appreciate the game in the 1980’s when I lived in Washington and the local pro team, the Washington Diplomats, purchased the services of an aging, but still hugely talented player named Johan Cruyff.

Cruyff is considered one of the true legends of the game and while he was clearly past his prime, what he could do with a ball on his foot was absolutely magical. An attacking forward with an uncanny ability to put the ball in the net, Cruyff introduced me to some of the subtleties of game and for much of the last 30 years, I have built on that knowledge to where I can now watch the game and revel in its ins and outs - even if the result is a scoreless tie.

Because of this lack of tradition, soccer will not be a major sport in America for the foreseeable future. Will the kids who played the game in their youth pass their love of the game on to their own children? If they do, it may take a few generations but eventually, soccer may indeed take its place as a favored sport of Americans.

My latest article is up at FrontPage.com where I examine what it is Israel’s critics want the Jewish state to do to protect itself.

A sample:

In the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla incident, we have witnessed a tsunami of virulent, over-the-top criticism of the state of Israel for its actions in interdicting the so-called “peace activists” before they could dock at the port of Gaza.

Reasonable people can argue whether the decision on the methods used to stop the ships was the correct course for the Israeli government to take. Indeed, there is a healthy debate within Israel itself over this very issue, including questions about intelligence, tactics, and whether the propaganda victory handed to pro-Palestinian activists could have been avoided while still maintaining the blockade.

Even the efficacy of the blockade itself is being discussed in Israel, as it has been since the quarantine was intensified nearly 3 years ago. For these internal critics, and those elsewhere who do not wish to see the state of Israel or its people destroyed, it is much too glib to ascribe their opposition as anti-Semitic or even anti-Israeli. But we can certainly put a reasonable question to these critics that never seems to get answered amidst the bombast and posturing from both the Jew haters and genuine “peace” seekers alike.

What is it you would have the Israeli government do to protect itself?

Indeed, what marks the critic of Israeli policy is a disconnect between the perilous reality of Israel’s exposed position vis-a-vis the Palestinians and those nations that support them. They hold a pie-in-the-sky belief that if Israel would only remove the irritants the Palestinians suffer on a daily basis, that the animosity felt by Israel’s enemies would magically disappear.

You can certainly oppose the policies of the Israeli government without standing accused of being an anti-Semite. But at the same time, I believe that even these “peace” critics of Israel are hardpressed to come up with alternatives that would accomplish the same goal - namely, protecting Israel from enemies who wish to destroy her.

The Fence is no doubt a burden on Palestinians. But it has reduced attacks on Israel civilians to near zero. Are critics suggesting that the Israeli government do less than everything within their power to protect their citizens? As long as there are thousands of Palestinians willing to blow themselves up just so they can take a lot of innocent Israelis with them, I would posit the idea that it is a moral imperative for the government to construct a barrier between the fanatics and the innocent.

Since neither Hamas or Fatah have any intention of reining in suicide bombers and those who fire rockets into Israeli villages, what moral stricture should Israel follow to ease the blockade, or tear down the Fence? That it is better to die than allow your avowed enemy to suffer? I don’t follow the logic of these critics which makes me more convinced that the disconnect they suffer is a moral was well as a logic trap. They appear to me unable to make a leap beyond their obvious concern for the burdens under which Palestinians live and see the issues from the standpoint of Israel reacting to efforts to destroy her.

Why this singular fact should receive less moral weight than Palestinian suffering is a mystery to me. If someone could explain it, I’d be grateful.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Monica Showalter, Rich Baehr, and Stephen Green for a look at today’s primaries and a discussion about November’s mid terms.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

On Saturday night at 8:52 PM local time, a tornado ripped through my hometown of Streator Illinois, touching down just a couple of hundred yards from my house.

My PJ Media article today is about my brush with nature unbound:

The twister tore through the southern part of town, wreaking a path of destruction 400 yards wide. It didn’t sound like a freight train - the usual description you read in the newspapers. Freight trains don’t roar like a wild beast and beat holy hell against your windows seeking to get in. The rattling, clacking, and shaking of my brick house was augmented by the rending, tearing sounds of tree limbs snapping, the popping of transformers (sounding just like old-fashioned flash bulbs exploding), and a strange, terrifying high-pitched whine that made it sound as if all the furies in the world had been unleashed and were circling my home in anticipation of its destruction.

Then, a huge cracking sound and a thump. Half our elm tree in the backyard had split and fallen lengthwise across the lawn, brushing against the sliding doors in the dining room. Another couple of feet and it would have crashed through. Then there was another tremendous ripping noise followed by a crash as a section of our fence tore away and smashed into the AC unit.

Where was I when this occurred? I was standing at the top of the stairs to the basement in the kitchen with legs so weak that I knew if I tried to go downstairs, I would have fallen and broken my neck. So I stood there, not two feet from our large kitchen window, too terrified to move to safety, mesmerized by the scene outside that was now being lit up constantly by lightning. The trees were bending to near 45 degree angles. The small twigs and branches that were banging into the window were competing with the constant, driving, sideways rain that was almost as loud as the wind.

Most people who die in tornadoes are hit by debris from their own house. It was monumentally stupid to stand next to a window with the wind blowing near 100 miles per hour, but clear thinking is not possible when witnessing nature unbound. In retrospect, it has made me appreciate the ancients a little more who worshiped the power of the natural world, named weather events for gods, and though superstitious to a fault, had a healthier respect for what nature could do than I (and probably many people living today).

I am getting it in the comments from people who say I acted like a coward, that I should “grow a pair,” that I am “childish.” Well, OK. I will gladly give you the three minutes I lived through when that tornado was roaring through the neighborhood. I am sure that these big, brave he-men would spit in the twister’s eye while waddling down stairs to the basement trying to keep their huge balls from scraping the steps.

The truth is, we have an unfinished basement with no banister on the stairway so that even when there is no emergency, going down the steps is an adventure. I would have made my way downstairs earlier except trying to corral three terrorized cats proved to be a difficult proposition. By the time they were all downstairs, the National Weather Service was telling people to take cover immediately so I grabbed my laptop, my carton of cigs, and my wallet. Just when I turned to go, the power went down, the wind came up, and terror took over.

I daresay that anyone - especially those critics in the comments who are poster children for why I don’t allow comments on this site anymore - would have felt exactly as I did.

I feel kind of ridiculous explaining myself but a record had to be made somewhere. I couldn’t include all of this in the article - it would have been way too long and detracted from the narrative.

Regardless, I have to give props to Com Ed who restored power in about 36 hours - power came on 5 minutes before the Hawks game on Sunday night. I understand that even now, there are hundreds of homes and businesses without electricity so I feel pretty lucky.

Two years ago it was the flood in Algonquin. Now a tornado. God seems to be going down the list of natural threats he can throw against me so I guess earthquakes might be next.

They’ve been expecting the Big One along the New Madrid fault for a while. That will probably be my next travail. Better lay in supplies because the way Obama handles disasters, it might be a year before I see any help.

My latest article is up at Pajamas Media and I have to brag a little and say that it will be a record setter in the number of people who will disagree with me.

In it, I take to task pitcher Armando Galarraga, umpire Jim Joyce, and Commissioner Bud Selig for trying to damage the history and integrity of the game by contemplating overturning Joyce’s missed call that cost Galarraga a perfect game the other night:

Joyce’s reaction to all this has been unbelievable. He is being praised from one end of the country to the other for his “honesty” in admitting his mistake. He should be fined, suspended, and prevented from working either the postseason or the All-Star Game. Not for missing the call but for undermining his and every other umpire’s credibility by actually talking to the press about it in the first place, and then not having the courage to stand by his decision made in real time on the field. Instead, he blubbered like a two-year-old about being sorry for ruining Galarraga’s moment.

Jim Joyce, Armando Galarraga, and Bud Selig are not more important than the game itself. And each of those gentlemen has done a disservice to baseball by elevating themselves and a single play over the integrity of the game. Blown calls are a part of baseball. They are part of the history of the game, and will continue to be a part of baseball as long as human beings are used to make the judgments necessary to maintain a fair outcome — or as fair as it can be made given the limitations and lack of perfection in all of us.

If Joyce had to talk to the press, he could have said that he called it as he saw it and pretty much left it at that. It doesn’t matter if replays show a different outcome to the call. Umpires make their decisions and, right or wrong, that’s that. Rare is the umpire’s call that is overturned. If it is, the call is reversed by the crew chief usually after a huddle of all the umpires to determine if any of them saw the call another way.

Treating this one call any differently than the thousands of others he has made in his career is an error in judgment far worse than the missed call he made at first base. Rather than the focus being on the game, and the still-brilliant pitching performance of Galarraga (he pitched a 3-0 shutout), attention shifted to the umpire and his media mea culpa. Umpires should never be the the center of attention in baseball. That’s not their job, although some modern umpires don’t seem to understand that. In fact, Major League baseball just took the nearly unprecedented step of fining an umpire for bringing attention to himself in the aftermath of an incident in Chicago. Joyce should be fined for the same reason, regardless if he was “honest” or not.

Meanwhile, Galarraga is receiving kudos for his “sportsmanship” in not holding it against the umpire. Holy smokes, fella. Act like a human being (or at least a baseball player) rather than some Oprahfied dishrag of a professional athlete. In an age where parents discourage their kids from competing, where every kid who participates gets a reward, where there is less emphasis on winning and losing, Galarraga becomes a poster boy for modern American sports. I will take the attitude of a Vince Lombardi any day of the week over Galarraga and his milquetoast, touchy-feely sensibilities. I’d rather see him break his hand against the clubhouse wall by hitting it in frustration and anger following the game than smile like an idiotic gnome and play the role of national priest in forgiving Joyce his sin.

It is out of fashion today to love baseball - its history, it’s myths, and its former place in American society. I can’t believe that my take on this is that unique; that there are those who love the game as I do and view with alarm this breach of baseball etiquette, seeking to have a call made in good faith on the field overturned because the umpire got it wrong.

Are we now to retroactively award glory to those robbed of it because of a call that might have been incorrect? Are we to overturn the results of games because an umpire called a home run foul rather than fair, or a player safe at home with the winning run instead of calling him out? Where does it end?

It’s a can of worms - and that includes expanding the use of instant replay. Football, a game that doesn’t honor its past half as much as baseball, had no qualms about instituting a ridiculous “challenge” system for replay. That’s because football refs are amateurs compared to baseball umpires. They weren’t paid a decent wage for their work, necessitating second jobs to augment their meager salary. In a game that generates billions in revenue, football officials were a joke. The age of instant replay exposed the amateurish nature of football officials and thus, the almost desperate necessity to rectify their idiotic mistakes on the field.

Not so Major League umpires who have a grueling route to the top, spending years in the minors with no guarantee of a call up. They are still the best in pro sports, despite a significant drop in quality as a result of unionization that granted job protections to some who in the past, might have been sent back down for more seasoning or even relieved of their duties outright. As a group, their performance is head and shoulders above football, hockey, and basketball refs despite the fact that, during the course of a game, they must make many more judgments than their brethren in other sports. (International soccer refs are far and away, the absolute worst in sports as we shall see during the World Cup that begins next week.)

I did not make these criticisms lightly. Something important has been lost with this incident and I fear for the future integrity of baseball, and mourn the disrespect the aftermath of this incident has given to the history of the game.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Jeff Dunetz of Yid with a Lid, Jazz Shaw, and AT’s James Lewis as we discuss the incident in the waters off of Gaza.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

It’s too bad America’s best ally in the Middle East has to deal with this empty suit in the White House. With the entire rest of the world in full throated outrage over the terrorist ambush - and it has been for more than 24 hours - we have yet to hear from the man who is ostensibly the Commander in Chief and has been constitutionally delegated to make our foreign policy.

Where the hell is the President of the United States?

Sure, he’s on vacation and all - must recharge the batteries after all those exertions on behalf of - well - some of the people anyway. But you would think that even Barack Obama could find the time between pick up basketball games and pleasant naps on the holiday weekend to personally issue a statement on a matter of war and peace - especially one involving an ally he swears he supports.

Ominously, the reason for this dearth of presidential interest may, in fact, be a not so subtle message that the US is about to turn on its beleaguered ally and join most of the rest of the world in ignoring the facts and pretending that Hamas has any legitimate claim to being an aggrieved party, and that the organization that funded these “peace” activists was a designated terrorist outfit.

Meanwhile, our State Department didn’t take the holiday off - although judging by the pablum they put out on the incident, perhaps they should have:

The United States deeply regrets the tragic loss of life and injuries suffered among those involved in the incident today aboard the Gaza-bound ships. We are working to ascertain the facts, and expect that the Israeli government will conduct a full and credible investigation.

The United States remains deeply concerned by the suffering of civilians in Gaza. We will continue to engage the Israelis on a daily basis to expand the scope and type of goods allowed into Gaza to address the full range of the population’s humanitarian and recovery needs. We will continue to work closely with the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority, along with international NGOs and the UN, to provide adequate access for humanitarian goods, including reconstruction materials, through the border crossings, while bearing in mind the Government of Israel’s legitimate security concerns. However, Hamas’ interference with international assistance shipments and work of nongovernmental organizations, and its use and endorsement of violence, complicates efforts in Gaza. Mechanisms exist for the transfer of humanitarian assistance to Gaza by governments and groups that wish to do so. These mechanisms should be used for the benefit of all those in Gaza.

Ultimately, this incident underscores the need to move ahead quickly with negotiations that can lead to a comprehensive peace in the region.

But on the White House website ? Not a whisper. Not a blog post. Nothing. This is to be expected. It takes time to craft a statement that stabs your best ally in the back without making it appear that you are doing so.

UPDATE

Jake Tapper is reporting that “there won’t be any daylight between the US and Israel in the aftermath of the incident on the flotilla yesterday…”

I will believe that when I see it. In fact, the administration is hanging their hat on the Security Council statement released late last night. Sources are bragging to Tapper how they diluted the statement so that blame for the incident is vague. But the statement still makes no mention of the reason for the blockade - that, what the Council demands as far as the “unimpeded provision and distribution of humanitarian assistance throughout Gaza…” would result in Hamas receiving an avalanche of arms from their friends in Tehran and Damascus. One need only look at the Hezballah resupply following their war with the Jewish state under the noses of UNIFIL to understand the Israeli’s concern.

And the statement makes it clear that it is setting Israel up for another “Goldstone Moment” where Tel Aviv’s own investigation of the incident will be declared invalid and another, “impartial” investigation undertaken by the UN will no doubt finger the real culprits in the incident.

Who do you think that might be?

This blog post originally appears on The American Thinker.

This article originally appears on The Moderate Voice

Jacob Weisberg writing in Slate:

One way to understand the divisions in the Republican Party is as a clash of regional philosophies. Northeastern conservatism is moderate, accepts the modern welfare state, and dislikes mixing religion with politics. Western conservatism is hawkish, hates government, and embraces individual freedom. Southern conservatism is populist, draws on evangelical Christianity, and plays upon racial resentments. The big drama of the GOP over the past several decades has been the Northeastern view giving way to the Southern one. To see this transformation in a single family, witness the shift from George H.W. Bush to George W. Bush.

Yet since the second Bush left the White House, something different appears to be happening in Republicanland: a shift away from Southern-style conservatism to more of a Western variety. You see this in the figures who have dominated the GOP since Barack Obama’s election 19 months ago: Dick Cheney, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rand Paul. You see it in the right’s overarching theme: opposition to any expanded role for government, whether in promoting economic recovery, extending health care coverage, or regulating financial markets. You see it most strongly in the Tea Party movement that in recent months has captured the party’s imagination and driven its agenda.

Although marked by a cartoonish analysis (Southern Conservatives are walking around with a bible in one hand and the constitution in the other), Weisberg gets it. What the Tea Party people represent - and it’s an attitude that the Southern Conservatives are beginning to adopt - is what Weisberg correctly alludes to as “soft libertarianism.” In historical terms, it presages Goldwater by about 100 years or more, although Goldwater was it’s modern equivalent.

It’s what we used to call the “pioneering spirit” best illustrated by by those hardy folk who settled the lands beyond the Mississippi River. Note I write “settled” rather than “explored.” Those who first mapped the trails that led to the hundreds of thousands of easterners making their way west, as well as the early traders, Mountain Men, and ne’er do wells who roamed the wilderness searching for their fortune, had no interest in “settling” or “pioneering” anything. They were closer to anarchists than pioneers. Government - any kind of government - established anywhere near them was considered a threat.

The genuine pioneers on the other hand, recognized that government must be established wherever they laid down roots if only for their own protection. While establishing a strong, self reliant credo, they nevertheless turned to Washington to protect them from the depredations of Indians (riled by the settlers who built on disputed lands), as well as protecting the railroads and regulating the rivers so that the fruits of their labors had a ready market where they could be sold.

In short, where Weisberg portrays Western Conservatism as something akin to the anarchists who opened the West, they were, in fact, not hostile to government at all. Being Americans of that time, they had no cause to support welfare or social engineering schemes. And if Weisberg would take the time to read and understand what the Tea Party people are all about, he would realize that it is not social welfare programs that these Conservatives oppose. Rather, they believe that these programs are best run by the states, and that Washington has no business dictating social policy. In short, it’s a more robust federalism that most of these Western Conservatives are espousing.

Yes, there are some in this camp who believe all welfare should come from churches and private institutions, with no government involvement at all in creating a safety net for the poor. Similarly, like Governor Perry of Texas (who straddles the Southern/Western conservative divide), there are some who think that beyond establishing a national defense and running foreign policy, the federal government should leave the rest to the states.

Perry said in his speech at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference that the only things the federal government should be doing:, “Have a strong military, secure our borders, and deliver the mail on time. And that’s it. … And until you can get those three right, how about leaving everything else alone?”

Not even Goldwater would go that far, and these activists have about as much chance of realizing that dream as Ron Paul has of getting elected president.

Mainstream Tea Party activists are opposing the Obama agenda on tactical grounds, as well as the simple principle that what the president is attempting with health care, cap and trade, financial reform, and other agenda items is imprudent, unworkable, and goes far beyond any rational, reasonable response to what he is trying to fix.

It continues to amaze me that pundits like Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Ygelsias, and now Weisberg constantly refer to President Obama as a “moderate” or a “moderate liberal.” Moderates do not name Van Jones to any position of responsibility within 5,000 miles of Washington, D.C. Nor does a “moderate liberal” tear apart something as interwoven into the lives of individual citizens and the entire American economy as the health care system is, and replace it literally with God knows what. Also, moderates do not show up on the National Journal’s ranking of liberal senators as number one - ever.

These pundits are mystified by the Tea Party’s opposition to these fantastically imprudent legislative initiatives because they fail to understand the underlying rationale of most Tea Party activists. These are communitarian efforts to remake America into something alien, subsuming individual rights in a miasmic fog of positive rights for which there is no basis in the Constitution, nor connection to tradition, First Principles, or common sense.

It can be said that the Tea Party opposition to these initiatives has a decidedly partisan bent. Not wanting to give Obama and the Democrats anything resembling a victory is at the heart of their efforts. A glance at the previous 8 years of opposition to the Bush agenda for exactly the same reasons shows where that idea came from.

But if McCain had been elected, he too would have been forced by dint of political necessity to come up with answers to many of the issues that Obama has dealt with. I doubt very much if a GOP-written health insurance reform bill would have been met with the kind of opposition that the Tea Party activists gave Obamacare. And the necessity for some kind of financial regulation to rein in the big banks and deal with some of the underlying causes of the financial meltdown would have been unavoidable. There probably would have been no Tea Party movement in the first place.

What Weisberg and other liberal pundits fail to grasp is that while I agree there is a sizable segment among Western and Southern conservatives who ascribe to the “Leave me the hell alone” school of conservatism, it is tempered by the reality of the majority who don’t want to get rid of government, but rather make it the servant of the people and not the other way around. The preferred way to do this is re-establish a robust federalism where tax money and social programs - as much as it is practicable - are transferred to state governments. This is a lot different than the anarchists that Weisberg and others portray the Tea Party activists.

Perhaps if they took off their rose colored glasses through which they view the president, they might better understand the real pluses and minuses of the Tea Party rather than the shallow, cartoonish view they currently hold.