Eric Holder, A Legacy of Race-Based Radicalism

Posted By Matthew Vadum On September 26, 2014 @ 12:59 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 106 Comments

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Attorney General Eric Holder is at long last relinquishing his cabinet post after nearly six unprecedented, catastrophic years of racial demagoguery and gangsterism.

Holder, who announced yesterday that he will leave office when a replacement is selected, will leave behind what is probably the most ugly and toxic legacy of any attorney general ever in the history of the republic.

Although he has all the moral authority of disbarred Duke Lacrosse prosecutor Mike Nifong, Holder knows he is immune to criticism because he is black and a radical leftist. He is a protected, pampered member of the ruling class and his arrogance knows no bounds. He ignores court orders and gives congressional overseers the finger.

Holder has transformed the U.S. Department of Justice into a racial grievance incubator, an intensive care unit for kooky, authoritarian ideas that should have died after the 1960s. The DoJ, especially its rotten, totally corrupt Civil Rights Division, is a lawyerly commune for revolutionaries who oppose the very idea of the rule of law. Critical Legal Theory and Critical Race Theory govern much of what goes on in the department.

It is no exaggeration to say that Holder leaves death and destruction behind after saturation-bombing the Constitution, orchestrating criminal activity in order to whip up public support for policy changes, fomenting racial tension and violence, persecuting political opponents and disfavored industries, obstructing justice, and enforcing laws arbitrarily and capriciously and in a manner calculated to benefit his friends and allies.

It was all too predictable. Holder was the official assigned to vet President Bill Clinton’s 176 last-minute pardons in January 2001. Among those pardoned were former Weather Underground members Susan Rosenberg and Linda Evans. He was deeply involved in Clinton’s pardons of fugitive financier Marc Rich and Puerto Rican terrorists. Holder is an archetype, a living, breathing embodiment of American political corruption.

“The news that Holder is going to resign should be bittersweet to anyone who cares about racial equality and the rule of law,” says Injustice author J. Christian Adams, a lawyer who used to work at the DoJ.

“The damage he has already done to the country leaves a turbulent wake that is ill-matched to the financial reward awaiting him at a shameless and large Washington, D.C., law firm. Our country is more polarized and more racially divided because of Eric Holder. He turned the power of the Justice Department into a racially motivated turnout machine for the Democratic Party. That was his job in this administration, and he did it well.”

Holder’s time in office “represents the beginnings of a post-Constitutional era, where the chief law enforcement officer of the United States serves to dismantle legal traditions,” according to Adams.

“Holder is the first attorney general to whom law seemed to be an option, a suggestion on the way to a progressive future. Most folks, and most lawyers, who didn’t devote daily attention to him might not have noticed the ground shifting during his tenure. But shift it did, and very deliberately.”

Activism, as opposed to enforcing the law, is the proper role of the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, according to Holder. “Any attorney general who is not an activist is not doing his or her job,” he pontificated earlier this year.

Holder is about race, race, and race. It’s what gets him up in the morning. His sick fixation on skin color is notable even in an administration jam-packed with racial obsessives and identity politics-driven Marxists. He brands those who oppose him as racists. This is usually enough to shut up most Republican lawmakers.

Holder has called America “essentially a nation of cowards,” because most Americans don’t share his radical left-wing multiculturalist views on race.

“We, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race. It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable…. This nation has still not come to grips with its racial past … ”

So America remains a deeply racist nation, just as biased against blacks as it was in the Jim Crow era, as Holder sees it. Government-mandated racism such as affirmative action programs and other special treatment for minorities is desperately needed, in his view.

As attorney general, Holder refused to prosecute the New Black Panther Party members who openly brandished weapons at a Philadelphia polling station in 2008 in order to intimidate white voters. He also refused to enforce electoral integrity laws and ferociously opposes voter ID laws because he alleges they discriminate against minorities. He supports affirmative action programs, which by definition, of course, are racist because they discriminate against white Americans. He stood behind the egregious “Pigford” settlement, a vote-buying scheme that handed out government cash to black farmers whether or not they suffered discrimination at the hands of federal agriculture officials.

Justice isn’t blind with Holder. It has rose-colored eyeglasses.

Under Holder, the Department of Justice sent taxpayer-paid community organizers down to Sanford, Florida, to generate mobs to agitate against the so-called white Hispanic, George Zimmerman, since-acquitted of the murder of black juvenile delinquent Trayvon Martin. The agency has done the same thing in the case of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man shot dead after accosting a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Of course, Holder is the first black U.S. attorney general, a fact he loves to repeat over and over again in speeches and media interviews, as if his race were a bona fide job qualification.
But he is also the first U.S. attorney general in memory to openly declare that he works only to protect the interests of what he calls “my people,” or those who share his skin color. White Americans with civil rights complaints are not a priority in Holder’s Justice Department.

Holder possesses an off-putting combination of creepy self-righteousness, cockiness, hatred of country, and racist contempt for white Americans that makes him the darling of the activist Left and the mainstream media that refuses to report on his many, many misdeeds.

Holder is not We The People’s lawyer. He is a talented political fixer who would be perfectly at home in Al Capone’s Chicago. He serves as a personal consigliere, or mob lawyer, to President Obama, the highest elected gangster in the land. And he will never double-cross the capo di tutti capi. He will bend and twist any statute into pretzels, torture any legal precedent into obedience, and strong-arm anyone who gets in his way.

Holder is the legal ringleader for today’s Democrats and their culture of corruption. After being held in criminal contempt of Congress in June 2012 –the first such citation against a sitting attorney general in American history– he is just a few steps away from being impeached in the House of Representatives and tried in the Senate for the high crimes and misdemeanors he has committed against the American people.

A formal impeachment resolution, H.Res. 411 accuses Holder of wrongdoing in connection with his involvement in the Fast and Furious scandal (that reportedly left hundreds of Mexicans and a U.S. border patrolman dead), refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act, refusing to prosecute IRS officials who leaked confidential GOP donor tax information, and providing misleading testimony to Congress about whether he approved invasive investigative tactics against reporters like James Rosen of Fox News.

This morally bankrupt racketeer ought to spend the rest of his life in prison. Probably nothing will happen to him. Rumor around Washington has it that President Obama wants to put Holder on the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, Holder ally and professional racial huckster Al Sharpton boasts that he is playing a significant role in selecting Holder’s successor.

He says his so-called civil rights group, the tax-evading National Action Network, is “engaged in immediate conversations” with the Obama White House as officials consider a replacement for Holder.

Sharpton drooled over Holder, calling him the “best” attorney general ever on civil rights-related issues.

“The resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder is met with both pride and disappointment by the Civil Rights community,” said the Jew-hating man who orchestrated the Tawana Brawley rape hoax years ago.

“We are proud that he has been the best Attorney General on Civil Rights in U.S. history and disappointed because he leaves at a critical time when we need his continued diligence most.”

The fact that racial arsonist Sharpton holds Holder in such high regard speaks volumes.

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The Khorosan Group Does Not Exist

It’s a fictitious name the Obama administration invented to deceive us. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

September 27, 2014

Before getting on a flight Tuesday to New York City, where he was expected to speak about climate change, President Obama addressed the airstrikes that the U.S. launched Monday night against the Islamic State in Syria. (AP)

We’re being had. Again.

For six years, President Obama has endeavored to will the country into accepting two pillars of his alternative national-security reality. First, he claims to have dealt decisively with the terrorist threat, rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees. Second, he asserts that the threat is unrelated to Islam, which is innately peaceful, moderate, and opposed to the wanton “violent extremists” who purport to act in its name.

Now, the president has been compelled to act against a jihad that has neither ended nor been “decimated.” The jihad, in fact, has inevitably intensified under his counterfactual worldview, which holds that empowering Islamic supremacists is the path to security and stability. Yet even as war intensifies in Iraq and Syria — even as jihadists continueadvancing, continue killing and capturing hapless opposition forces on the ground despite Obama’s futile air raids — the president won’t let go of the charade.

Hence, Obama gives us the Khorosan Group.

The who?

There is a reason that no one had heard of such a group until a nanosecond ago, when the “Khorosan Group” suddenly went from anonymity to the “imminent threat” that became the rationale for an emergency air war there was supposedly no time to ask Congress to authorize.

You haven’t heard of the Khorosan Group because there isn’t one. It is a name the administration came up with, calculating that Khorosan — the –Iranian–​Afghan border region — had sufficient connection to jihadist lore that no one would call the president on it.

The “Khorosan Group” is al-Qaeda. It is simply a faction within the global terror network’s Syrian franchise, “Jabhat al-Nusra.” Its leader, Mushin al-Fadhli (believed to have been killed in this week’s U.S.-led air strikes), was an intimate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the emir of al-Qaeda who dispatched him to the jihad in Syria. Except that if you listen to administration officials long enough, you come away thinking that Zawahiri is not really al-Qaeda, either. Instead, he’s something the administration is at pains to call “core al-Qaeda.”

“Core al-Qaeda,” you are to understand, is different from “Jabhat al-Nusra,” which in turn is distinct from “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (formerly “al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia,” now the “Islamic State” al-Qaeda spin-off that is, itself, formerly “al-Qaeda in Iraq and al-Sham” or “al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant”). That al-Qaeda, don’t you know, is a different outfit from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula . . . which, of course, should never be mistaken for “al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” “Boko Haram,” “Ansar al-Sharia,” or the latest entry, “al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent.”

Coming soon, “al-Qaeda on Hollywood and Vine.” In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if, come 2015, Obama issued an executive order decreeing twelve new jihad jayvees stretching from al-Qaeda in January through al-Qaeda in December.

Except you’ll hear only about the jayvees, not the jihad. You see, there is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries.

As these columns have long contended, Obama has not quelled our enemies; he hasminiaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole — a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way.

For a product of the radical Left like Obama, terrorism is a regrettable but understandable consequence of American arrogance. That it happens to involve Muslims is just the coincidental fallout of Western imperialism in the Middle East, not the doctrinal command of a belief system that perceives itself as engaged in an inter-civilizational conflict. For the Left, America has to be the culprit. Despite its inbred pathologies, which we had no role in cultivating, Islam must be the victim, not the cause. As you’ll hear from Obama’s Islamist allies, who often double as Democrat activists, the problem is “Islamophobia,” not Muslim terrorism.

This is a gross distortion of reality, so the Left has to do some very heavy lifting to pull it off. Since the Islamic-supremacist ideology that unites the jihadists won’t disappear, it has to be denied and purged. The “real” jihad becomes the “internal struggle to become a better person.” The scriptural and scholarly underpinnings of Islamic supremacism must be bleached out of the materials used to train our national-security agents, and the instructors who resist going along with the program must be ostracized. The global terror network must be atomized into discrete, disconnected cells moved to violence by parochial political or territorial disputes, with no overarching unity or hegemonic ambition. That way, they can be limned as a manageable law-enforcement problem fit for the courts to address, not a national-security challenge requiring the armed forces.

The president has been telling us for years that he handled al-Qaeda by killing bin Laden. He has been telling us for weeks that the Islamic State — an al-Qaeda renegade that will soon reconcile with the mother ship for the greater good of unity in the anti-American jihad — is a regional nuisance that posed no threat to the United States. In recent days, however, reality intruded on this fiction. Suddenly, tens of thousands of terrorists, armed to the teeth, were demolishing American-trained armies, beheading American journalists, and threatening American targets.

Obama is not the manner of man who can say, “I was wrong: It turns out that al-Qaeda is actually on the rise, its Islamic State faction is overwhelming the region, and American interests — perhaps even American territory — are profoundly threatened.” So instead . . . you got “the Khorosan Group.”

You also got a smiley-face story about five Arab states joining the United States in a coalition to confront the terrorists. Finally, the story goes, Sunni governments were acting decisively to take Islam back from the “un-Islamic” elements that falsely commit “violent extremism” under Islam’s banner.

Sounds uplifting … until you read the fine print. You’ve got to dig deep to find it. It begins, for example, 42 paragraphs into the Wall Street Journal’s report on the start of the bombing campaign. After the business about our glorious alliance with “moderate” allies like Saudi Arabia and Qatar who so despise terrorism, we learn:

Only the U.S. — not Arab allies — struck sites associated with the Khorasan group, officials said. Khorasan group members were in the final stages of preparations for an attack on U.S. and Western interests, a defense official said. Khorasan was planning an attack on international airliners, officials have said. . . . Rebels and activists contacted inside Syria said they had never heard of Khorasan and that the U.S. struck several bases and an ammunition warehouse belonging to the main al Qaeda-linked group fighting in Syria, Nusra Front. While U.S. officials have drawn a distinction between the two groups, they acknowledge their membership is intertwined and their goals are similar.

Oops. So it turns out that our moderate Islamist partners have no interest in fighting Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate. Yes, they reluctantly, and to a very limited extent, joined U.S. forces in the strikes against the Islamic State renegades. But that’s not because the Islamic State is jihadist while they are moderate. It is because the Islamic State has made mincemeat of Iraq’s forces, is a realistic threat to topple Assad, and has our partners fretting that they are next on the menu.

Meantime, though, the Saudis and Qatar want no trouble with the rest of al-Qaeda, particularly with al-Nusra. After all, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch is tightly allied with the “moderate opposition” that these “moderate” Gulf states have been funding, arming, and training for the jihad against Assad.

Oh, and what about those other “moderates” Obama has spent his presidency courting, the Muslim Brotherhood? It turns out they are not only all for al-Qaeda, they even condemn what one of their top sharia jurists, Wagdy Ghoneim, has labeled “the Crusader war against the Islamic State.”

“The Crusaders in America, Europe, and elsewhere are our enemies,” Ghoneim tells Muslims. For good measure he adds, “We shall never forget the terrorism of criminal America, which threw the body of the martyred heroic mujahid, Bin Laden, into the sea.”

Obama has his story and he’s sticking to it. But the same can be said for our enemies.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

Jeter scripts perfect end to Bronx tale

In his final act at Yankee Stadium, Mr. November brought October to September

By Ian O'Connor

http://espn.go.com/new-york/mlb

September 26, 2014

• Derek Jeter follows through on an RBI double to left field during the first inning of a baseball game against the Baltimore Orioles, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2014, in New York. Photo: Julie Jacobson, AP

NEW YORK -- Derek Jeter was falling apart as he wagged that black Louisville Slugger in the Yankee Stadium batter's box one last time, man on second, score tied, bottom of the ninth. He had spent the night in a state of utter chaos, his heart pounding and his face contorting this way and that as he fought off the emotion like he would a fastball in on his hands.

Only Jeter was losing this battle, and badly. He wanted to weep one minute, then reprimand himself the next. The man who always led the league in shrinking the biggest moments to a manageable size was being swallowed whole by the magnitude of his own goodbye, and yet the fans were standing and chanting and demanding that he deliver one more memory for the road.

"Please don't hit it to me," Jeter kept telling himself in the field. He'd run into the clubhouse bathroom during this game with the Baltimore Orioles to cry like he had as a homesick teenager in Tampa, Florida, in 1992, praying that his parents would take his sorry, bonus-baby self back to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and save him from wasting any more of the New York Yankees' cash.

[+] Enlarge

Elsa/Getty ImagesThe Captain capped his career in the Bronx with a ninth-inning, walk-off single in the Yankees' 6-5 win.

Jeter nearly cried as he drove himself to the ballpark. Before the game, with all Yankees gathered around, CC Sabathia presented Jeter with a watch and a blown-up portrait of The New Yorker magazine cover of Jeter tipping his cap, and The Captain quickly turned away from the gestures to hide his tears.

The whole day and night was a grueling struggle for control for an athlete who has always wanted to maintain control as much as he's wanted to breathe.

"I really thought I was going to break down," Jeter would concede. He said he'd spent two decades successfully trying to "trick myself" into ignoring the nerves or fatigue or pain he was feeling, but on Thursday night he realized he was completely overmatched in that pursuit.

The RBI double off the top of the left-center wall in the first inning and the broken-bat grounder with the bases loaded in the seventh -- a grounder Orioles shortstop J.J. Hardy threw away to allow two runs to score -- amounted to a satisfying farewell. Jeter was content to take those contributions to a 5-2 victory to the bank and then head for whatever is waiting for him at Fenway Park.

Only then, without warning, David Robertson started a game of home run derby in the top of the ninth, quieting those "Thank you, Derek" chants that had the quivering shortstop all but ready to pass out. Robertson's turned out to be the greatest blown save in Yankees history.

By the time it was Jeter's turn to bat, Brett Gardner had bunted pinch runner Antoan Richardson over to second. Everyone in the house knew Buck Showalter, Jeter's first manager in New York, wouldn't dare make the smart move and walk Jeter to set up the double play. Showalter would ask Evan Meek to pitch to the sixth-most prolific hitter of all time, the guy wagging that familiar P72.

Now batting for the Yankees, came Bob Sheppard's voice of God for the last time, numbah two, Derek Jeter. Numbah two.

And on big league hit No. 3,463, Jeter lashed at the first pitch (for what seems like the 2,237th time) and sent a hard single to right field (for what seems like the 2,237th time). Jeter pumped his arms high after he rounded first, and his teammates mobbed him for winning the first home game he'd ever played with his Yankees already eliminated from the playoff race.

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Suddenly, Joe Torre and Mariano and Andy and Jorge were out on the field, along with Bernie and Tino, too. Jeter hugged them all before waving his cap to the fans.

He'd walk out to shortstop, crouch down and bow his head to whisper his pregame prayer of thanks. He jogged over to his mother and father and sister in the stands. Before he wished a successful postseason journey for the Orioles -- all of them glued to the dugout rail -- Jeter said in his on-field YES Network interview that he spent the night throwing away balls, forgetting his elbow guard and giving signs to his double-play partner, Stephen Drew, when no Orioles were even on base.

He did another walk around the field to Sinatra's "My Way," repeatedly wiping his face with a towel. Jeter placed his cap against his heart and mouthed a "Thank you" to the crowd, and at 10:33 p.m. he embraced Torre near the dugout tunnel and then disappeared.

"I don't know how I played this game," Jeter had told the fans.

The Iceman melteth. On a night when biblical rain was supposed to wash this Jeter-palooza out to sea, The Captain's tears were the only drops in sight.

"You almost feel as if you're watching your own funeral," he said of his extended victory lap.

But Thursday night was more a fairy tale than a funeral. Jeter's near homer-turned-rousing RBI double in the first left witnesses wondering if this could turn out to be the kind of performance he delivered the day he reached 3,000 hits, a 5-for-5 day against the Tampa Bay Rays that included a soaring shot off David Price to hit the magic number.

Jeter had his share of big moments against Baltimore in the Bronx, after all: the Jeffrey Maier homer in 1996; the breaking of Lou Gehrig's franchise record for hits in 2009. This time around, Showalter's presence added another this-is-your-life element to the event.

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Showalter was just in his first year running the Yankees in 1992 when they drafted Jeter, a kid the manager described as "170 pounds soaking wet." Showalter was the one who promoted Jeter to the majors in 1995, the one who decided he was worthy of wearing a single-digit jersey. "You'd better be right about this," George Steinbrenner told him.

The manager was as right as he's ever been.

"I know there's a lot of people that have much more talent than I do, throughout the course of my career," Jeter said. "But I can honestly say I don't think anyone played harder ... I did it here in New York, which I think is much more difficult to do."

With his New York career complete, Jeter said he is done playing shortstop, that he wanted to keep the view and store it away for keeps. He will assume the role of designated hitter in Boston because it's the right thing to do for the rivalry and the fans.

Jeter plays. That's what he does. Had Joe Girardi removed Jeter from the top of the ninth the way he had Jeter and Pettitte remove Rivera last year, The Captain never would've batted in the bottom of the ninth, never would've followed up Robertson's meltdown with the perfect ending to his near-perfect Bronx tale.

"It's above and beyond anything I've ever dreamt of," Jeter said of the job.

"I couldn't have believed it myself," he said of the winning hit.

In the end, Derek Jeter turned a meaningless game into something that felt like a Game 7. Mr. November brought a piece of October to the back end of September, and it was one hell of a way to go out.

Ian O'Connor

ESPNNewYork.com columnist

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Ian O'Connor has won numerous national awards as a sports columnist and is the author of three books, including the bestseller, "The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter." ESPN Radio broadcasts "The Ian O'Connor Show" every Sunday from 7 to 9 a.m. ET. Follow Ian on Twitter »

Yankee Captain Derek Jeter does it the old fashioned way

Finally Jeter was back at shortstop, crouching down out there, after what he announced after the game was the last time he would ever play shortstop in the big leagues. He was out there at shortstop at Yankee Stadium for the last time.

BY MIKE LUPICA
http://www.nydailynews.com/sports
September 26, 2014

So this was the way it had to end for Derek Jeter at Yankee Stadium, with him turning a lost season for the Yankees and a lost September into a great October night out of the past, even the World Series night once when he won a game for the Yankees and they called him Mr. November. It was a single this time past first base against the Orioles in the bottom of the ninth, and it won the last game of baseball he will ever play at Yankee Stadium, and in that moment he gave them what they wanted in the Stadium, so loud with memory and love and even loss on this night:

He made himself young and, even more importantly, he made things the way they used to be for himself and these fans and this place.

The Orioles had given him one last at-bat, one last bottom of the ninth, in the top of the ninth, with a couple of home runs. Now a kid named Antoan Richardson was on second and Evan Meek was pitching and Jeter hit the first pitch he saw from Meek into right field and the Yankees had won, 6-5.

Then Jeter was a kid again, not 40 now, not at the end of a lost season, but the kid who had always found a way to make this kind of magic on the other side of 161st St., in the old Stadium. His arms were in the air and the Yankees were coming for him the way they used to come for him after they’d won another Series.

“Goose bumps,” Joe Torre had said earlier in the game, when Jeter nearly hit one over the left-field wall in the bottom of the first, a ball that turned out to be a rousing RBI double.

This was different now. Only when the Yankees won their last Series five years ago had there ever been a scene or a moment like this at the new place. Because as Jeter celebrated between first and second, you looked down near the Yankee dugout and somehow Torre was there, and Bernie Williams, and Andy Pettitte and Tino Martinez, and Jorge Posada and the great Mariano Rivera. In formation. The last great Yankee band of brothers. Waiting for the Captain of the Yankees one more time. While the place continued to go mad with chants and cheers for Derek Jeter.

“They’re like my brothers,” Jeter would say of his old teammates when interviewed on the field a few minutes later. “And Mr. T. was like a father.”

The night they closed down the old Stadium, it was Jeter was spoke for all of them, who spoke for the Yankees and what he helped them become again after he ran out to shortstop for good in April of 1996. He spoke about ghosts that night, the long line of Yankees who had made them the most famous sports team in this world.

These weren’t ghosts now. These were the old Yankees, these were Torre’s Yankees and Jeter’s Yankees, on this field, because Derek Jeter had won the last game he would ever play in that uniform, in that place, in the bottom of the ninth. It wasn’t Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at-bat at Fenway Park once, against an old Orioles pitcher named Jack Fisher, on the last swing he would ever take. But it was enough in the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium. It would do. As the people kept chanting his name, and chanting thanks, and making the night impossibly loud on the night when Derek Jeter said goodbye to Yankee fans and they said goodbye to them.

So he hugged all of his teammates and his manager, Joe Girardi, and then he was with Bernie, and Pettitte, and then Torre was hugging him, and so was Rivera. And the cheers kept hitting him from everywhere, on this night that was as much about these fans as it was about Jeter.

Sinatra was singing “New York, New York,” and then they were playing “My Way.” Jeter was back on the field, waving to all corners of the place, acknowledging the Orioles players and coaches and their manager, Buck Showalter, standing on the top step of their dugout.

Finally Jeter was back at shortstop, crouching down out there, after what he announced after the game was the last time he would ever play shortstop in the big leagues — he said he will be a DH when the Yankees play the Red Sox in Fenway Park to finish out this season. He was out there at shortstop at Yankee Stadium for the last time. It had all started for him in that spring in 1996 before all the winning started again. Now, in the midst of all this noise, on this night when the people did not want to leave the Stadium, when they did not want to say goodbye even though they had come to say goodbye, he was still the shortstop for the Yankees.

“I almost started crying driving here today,” he would say in the interview room later.

“I think I’ve done a pretty good job of controlling my emotions throughout my career,” he said.

But he had such flair to go with his great class and his great style, in a career when his “signature was winning,” as Showalter said before the game. He was Mr. November. He led with his chin one night against the Red Sox when he dove into the stands for a foul ball. He made that flip to beat the A’s in the playoffs. And when he got his 3,000th hit he did it with a home run off David Price, and no one who saw it and no one at the Stadium was remotely surprised.

So he gave them one more moment late Thursday night, when they said goodbye to him and he said goodbye to them, and he said he didn’t know why the fans kept chanting thank you because he’d only ever tried to do his job.

He did it again against the Orioles, in a bottom of the ninth that really felt like the bottom of his career. He won the game, he won the night, somehow it felt as if he won a lost season. Then Torre was there, and Mo, and the rest of them.

Things were the way they used to be for the Yankees. And Derek Jeter was young.

Jeter’s moment lets Yankees fans party like it’s 1999

By Joel Sherman

http://nypost.com/

September 26, 2014

A full house came to remember the past — but not the recent past.

What has generally been unforgivable in The Bronx — official elimination — was just 24 hours old and the home crowd would have one last chance to tell the Yankees what they thought about that condition.

But 48,613 came to praise Derek Jeter, not bury the 2014 Yankees. This celebration, two decades in the making, would not be deterred. Jeter is so beloved that arguably the most demanding fans in baseball were willing to suffer short-term amnesia, reduce a second straight season of playoff-less baseball as trivial — for one more night anyway. We are coming up to forever on the clock for Yankee fans to commiserate the post-Jeter era.

So for one last chance they all partied like it was 1999 — when Jeter was young, the Yankees were great and the good pinstriped times seemed as if they would go on forever.

Even Jeter was in that mood, admitting, “Today when I came in, I was reflecting on my career rather than this particular season.”

Welcome to Bizarro Jeter World.

The ultimate team player of this generation was a one-man show on Thursday night. He was the star of the most meaningful meaningless game in Yankee history. He got to play hero one last time because of a blown save by David Robertson that, of all things, will be remembered fondly in these parts.

It was that kind of night in that kind of Yankee season.

The coolest, never-let-them-see-you sweat athlete conceded he almost couldn’t play, so overcome was he by all the happy/sad emotions tied to his last game in The Bronx.

In the seventh, the fans groaned when Brett Gardner bounced into a force out at the plate that kept the tie-breaking run from scoring with no outs. But that disenchantment lasted one or two beats before the crowd erupted in recognition that meant Jeter would bat. He hit a grounder that Baltimore mishandled into an error that netted two runs.

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The game-winning singlePhoto: UPI

That would have been Jeter’s last at-bat in the Bronx, had Robertson not surrendered two homers in the ninth inning that enabled Baltimore to tie the score 5-5. Again, the crowd was momentarily Yankees fans. But then it dawned on them that Jeter was due third in the bottom of the ninth.

He came up with a runner on second, one out and as if feeling his anthology needed one more greatest hit, one of the most aggressive, opposite-field hitters in major league history lashed a first-pitch, opposite-field single to score the winning run. Yep, same as ever for the very last time. To unleash one more — and final — sustained love-fest moment between fans and player. Elimination was not on their minds, Adulation was.

“I lived a dream since I was 4-5 years old,” Jeter said. “And part of that dream is over now.”

He will never play shortstop again, saying that he did not want to man the position for a last time outside of New York. He likely will DH some in Boston. And exhale after this. After a night when the Amnesia Express could make itself believe, what with October in the weather, passion in the crowd, and Derek Jeter as leading man.

This was probably not the night to think too deeply that a player who insisted that he be judged by winning was being feted in just the second game he was ever active with the Yankees eliminated. Or how different things have been for the Yankees and Jeter since Oct. 3, 2012 — Game 2 of the ALCS — when Jeter fractured his ankle.

Before that Jeter had a movie script as much as a career. It was borderline magical that he was even available for the Yankees to pick him sixth overall in 1992 or that Jeffrey Maier was in right field or that the clock moved from Oct. 31 to Mr. November or that Art Howe didn’t pinch run for Jeremy Giambi or …

Jeter was what happens when exquisite talent meets perfect timing.

And then, after his ankle snapped, it was as if the magic spell snapped with it — as if he had used up the good of five careers and there was little to nothing left. The past two years his durability, excellence and winning ways all crumbled.

But at Jeter’s final home game ever, none of that mattered. Not the .250-ish average. The funereal No. 2 arm patch. The partnership with a memorabilia schlock-meister. The elimination.

The stands stayed full and loud to the end. Like the good old days. The fans stood and chanted the shortstop’s name. Got one more chance to see Jeter turn back the clock, do something heroic, party and play like it was 1999.

“It was an out-of-body experience,” he said.

Reality will soon set in. For now, though, the Magic Number was, as always, 2.