Thursday, January 31, 2013

The Veil Descends

By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com

Happy Warrior

From the January 15, 2013 issue of National Review

In the summer of 2010, mourners lined the streets of Wales's capital city to pay tribute to a seven-year-old boy killed in a house fire. In fact, Yaseen Ali Ege was brutally beaten to death, and then set alight with barbecue fuel. By his mother. For failing to learn the Koran. Over the preceding months, Mom had used a stick, a rolling pin, and a hammer on her son, but, despite these incentives, he had memorized only a couple of pages. And so she killed him, and subsequently declared she felt "100 percent better."
This month, at Cardiff Crown Court, Mrs. Ege was sentenced and jailed by Mr. Justice Wyn Williams for what he declared "a dreadful crime" that had inflicted "a good deal of pain" on an innocent boy. The judge, however, was discreet enough not to pass comment on more basic cultural questions. He had no view on whether or not being forced to learn the Koran is an appropriate educational priority for a "Welsh" schoolboy, so long as the parental hammer and kerosene remain locked up in the toolshed. Nor on whether a child so raised can be a fully functioning member of Western society. Yaseen's headmistress at Radnor Primary School, Ann James, called him "a delightful little boy and beautifully behaved who always had a smile on his face," and forbore to mention that on the day of his murder he had been kept home from class and the "teddy bears' picnic" because his mother felt he needed to focus on his Koranic studies.
To dust off the formulation that got me hauled before the Canadian "human rights" commissars: Time for the obligatory "of course"s. Of course not all Muslims brutalize their families — although the ten-year-old daughter of Asia Parveen of Stoke Newington was treated for 56 injuries after being beaten for not reading enough verses of the Koran, and Hesha Yones of west London had her throat cut by her father for being too "Westernized," and a five-month-old baby in Halmstad, Sweden, was beaten to death with a Koran, and this very month a campaign against Muslim domestic violence is being launched in Scotland, and a BBC poll last year revealed that two-thirds of young British Muslims favor violence against those who "dishonor" their families, and in the Netherlands Muslims make up 60 percent of the population of battered-women's shelters . . . And of course not all Muslims are self-segregating, although 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to first cousins, and in Bradford, Yorkshire, it's 75 percent . . .
Nevertheless, many Muslims share the broader cultural preferences of Yaseen's mother.
In that sense, Headmistress James and Mr. Justice Williams are lagging indicators. Britain is undergoing demographic transformation. According to the 2011 census, the United Kingdom's Muslim population doubled in the decade after 9/11. In Cardiff, Yaseen's funeral service was held in the Masjid-e-Bilal mosque, which was formerly a Christian church and was built during the Welsh Protestant revival in the 19th century. In Wales, Christian revival has come and gone. If the Muslim population doubles again this decade, Mr. Williams and Mrs. James will be joined on the bench and in the faculty lounge by Muslim judges and teachers. Would a Muslim jurist look more kindly on Mrs. Ege, at least with respect to motive? Or would a Muslim headmaster reorient teaching priorities to make Yaseen's extracurricular studies no longer necessary?
Who knows? In Wales as in much of the Western world, we are in the midst of an unprecedented sociocultural experiment. Its precise end point cannot be known, but on the Continent its contours are beginning to emerge: In Amsterdam, formerly "the most tolerant city in Europe," gay-bashing is now routine; "youths" busted into a fashion show, pulled a gay model from the catwalk, and beat him to a pulp. Claire Berlinski reported for National Review two years ago that in the French suburb of La Courneuve 77 percent of veiled women say they cover themselves to "avoid the wrath of Islamic morality patrols." In Potsdam, the Abraham Geiger Theological College advises its rabbis not to venture on the streets wearing identifying marks of their faith. In synagogues from Copenhagen to Berlin to Rome, Jews are warned to hide their yarmulkes under hats or baseball caps at the end of the service. In Paris, a man wearing no identifiably religious clothing was beaten unconscious on the Métro for being caught reading a book by France's chief rabbi. The message is consistent, from Jews to gays to women: In the new Europe, you don't want to be seen as the other. Keep your head down, or covered.
For a decade, I've been told by those who think I'm "alarmist" that there's nothing to see here. The seven-year-old whose non-appearance at the teddy bears' picnic goes unremarked . . . the beleaguered National Health Service reeling under the costs of genetic disorders from cousin marriage but now providing free and discreet "hymen reconstruction" for Muslim daughters who got a little over-Westernized one night . . . the infidel women going veiled to avoid trouble in les banlieues . . . the rabbis wearing baseball caps on the streets of Berlin and Brussels . . .
One reason that there's "nothing to see" is the ever greater lengths we go to to cover it, and ourselves, up. The veil descends, on all of us.

The Guns of Villaraigosa

January 31, 2013 - 12:07 am

Just because you might be expecting something doesn’t mean you can’t be disappointed when it happens.

Following December’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, we have witnessed the spectacle of politicians at every level of government tripping over each other to race before the cameras and proclaim their outrage, not at the perpetrator of the atrocity, but rather at the many law-abiding Americans who are employed in the making of firearms and the many, many more who use them recreationally. Something must be done, they tell us, “for the children.” That the “something” might be wholly ineffectual or even counterproductive in the fight against crime is of little significance when the real goal is to see one’s name in the headlines and one’s face on television.

To the surprise of no one who has followed the man’s career, joining President Obama, Vice President Biden, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and so many others in this farcical display is Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a lifelong politician who, facing the end of his term in office, seeks to hold aloft his profile — and his prospects for some future position at the public trough — by means of the type of shameless pandering for which he is well known. Mr. Villaraigosa has called on the managers for the city’s three pension funds to divest from any holdings in companies that manufacture so-called assault weapons. “It’s a moral and financial imperative to end our relationship with these companies,” said Mr.Villaraigosa, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, whose story added that it was unclear how much city pension money was invested in companies that make firearms. “I don’t want to make a quarter, not a penny, not a dime off of companies that make those weapons of war,” he said.

Put aside for the moment the fact that “assault weapon” is a term devoid of meaning other than to describe rifles whose appearance is in some quarters considered sinister. There is a further, even deeper incongruity in the mayor’s demand. The city of Los Angeles, more specifically its police department, is a customer for some of the very companies whose products he finds so distasteful. In the LAPD arsenal are weapons from Glock, Colt, Beretta, and Heckler & Koch, among others. And thank heavens for them, for among the department’s 10,000 officers are those who have defended their own and others’ lives with just these weapons.

The above named manufacturers are privately held, so the mayor’s investment advice will have little impact on them and most other firearms companies. But one major gun manufacturer represented in the LAPD’s inventory, Smith & Wesson, is publicly traded, with a price as of this writing of $8.83 per share on the NASDAQ. This is well above its 52-week low of $4.93, indicating it might be worthy of inclusion in any pension fund’s portfolio. And consider: If all of Smith & Wesson’s investors joined in Mr. Villaraigosa’s exercise in moral posturing, the company might cease to exist, thereby depriving the LAPD and most other police departments in the country of some essential tools of the trade. And this is to say nothing of the millions of other Americans who use Smith & Wesson guns for recreation and self-defense.

And though the term “assault weapon” has no intrinsic meaning, the other term invoked by the mayor, “weapons of war,” does conjure up an ominous image. The only problem for the mayor is that the weapons he refers to are not designed “for war,” but rather for hunting, target practice, and, most importantly, constitutionally protected self-defense. That Mr. Villaraigosa would discourage city pension funds from being invested in companies that make products intended for use that is explicitly encouraged in the Constitution says more about him than it does about the companies themselves.

But then, Mr. Villaraigosa is not a man known for his keen intellect or his grasp of legal nuance. Though he attended law school, he failed in four attempts to pass the California bar exam before forsaking a career in the law in favor of a less intellectually demanding life in politics, for which, happily for him, there is no qualifying examination. And if the mayor happens to be of modest wattage between the ears, it is a deficiency that scarcely distinguishes him from most members of the city council, for whom empty gestures like the mayor’s investment recommendation have come to be routine.

And it is a routine that is often not only devoid of substance or meaningful consequence but sometimes comically inept. Witness the orgy of self-congratulatory preening that occurred at L.A. City Hall when, in 2010, the city council voted to boycott the state of Arizona over its passage of SB 1070, the controversial state law on illegal immigration. Council members compared Arizona to Nazi Germany before voting 13-1 in favor of the boycott. Despite the council’s actions, last year the LAPD’s SWAT team was somehow allowed to purchase sniper rifles from McMillan Firearms Manufacturing, located in Phoenix. As part of the purchase price, McMillan offers two days of training on its ranges and with its gunsmiths so as to allow police officers the opportunity to familiarize themselves with the rifles. Such a training session would have cost the city of L.A. nothing but the price of gas, food, and lodging for four officers to travel to Phoenix. Permission was denied, allowing those who voted against it to cloak themselves in the cheap grace of this empty — and empty-headed — gesture.

Surely the city council will just as cravenly endorse the mayor’s call for divestment from gun makers, and they will all congratulate each other for their courageous stand against the NRA and the nefarious “gun lobby.” But in the end, as is the case with most of the effluence from City Hall, it won’t save any lives, it won’t stop any crimes, it won’t matter one bit.

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified image originally photographed by s_bukley / Shutterstock.com.)

Who are we?

By Mark Steyn
http://www.steynonline.com

Happy Warrior

From the January 30, 2013 issue of National Review

In my last column, I argued that culture trumps politics, since when many readers have demanded to know what exactly I meant. Well, look no further than the very first post-election issue Republicans were told they needed to address: getting on the right side of Hispanics by neutralizing the illegal-immigrant issue. A population perhaps the size of Australia's or four mid-sized EU nations' strolled into America and decided to stay. In doing so, they broke the law. Literally. That's to say, some of the most basic laws of the nation lie shattered and discarded. Municipally, we have "sanctuary cities." At the state level, Illinois is merely the latest to consider issuing driver's licenses and other legal ID to persons who are in the country illegally. Federally, the president himself has decreed by executive order that the laws of the nation not be enforced — and, indeed, anybody minded to try enforcing them (Arizona) gets hauled into court.
This is a highly legalistic society with laws against everything and most of them with stiff jail sentences attached. Yet a group of squatters has rendered the law irrelevant. Four of the September 11 terrorists obtained the picture ID they used to board the plane through the illegal-immigrant day-worker network in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven in Falls Church, Va. But 3,000 corpses wasn't enough to persuade either the citizenry or their representatives to end their indulgence of such networks. Indeed, it's estimated that half of the "undocumented" have come here since 9/11: That's to say, they broke into a country on Code Orange alert. The culture frames the issue, starting with the appropriation of language: These are "hard-working families" willing to do "the jobs Americans won't do," notwithstanding the strains they place on hospitals and schools, the contributions they make to gang crime and drunk-driving statistics . . . Once upon a time they were "illegal," then "undocumented," now just "immigrants," a word with longstanding emotional resonance in America but nevertheless one that used to mean guys who stood in line at consulates, filled in the paperwork, and paid the application fees, and whose redefinition into something entirely different has been accepted as a fait accompli.
I was at Starbucks the other day and saw that Tony Bennett has another celebrity-duets album out. He releases them every 20 minutes: You can count on the fingers of one hand the guys he hasn't sloughed off a duet with (Donald Rumsfeld, Herman van Rompuy, and Earl's brother who lives off of Route 23 past the grain elevator and doesn't come into town too much). But his latest duets set is an album with Latino superstars. He doesn't speak the lingo, so he does his usual Anglo shtick, and then they warble back at him in Spanish and he chuckles occasionally as if he has a clue what they're singing. But it's his management's way of cutting Tony in on a little of the action Latin-wise. That's all the GOP are trying to figure out how to do: Like Tony Bennett, their fellow old white male, they'd like to reposition themselves to be where it's at. Or at least on the general outskirts of where it's at. On this issue, as the current panic demonstrates, politicians are the least of it: They're playing catch-up.
Same with gay marriage. The culture has made up its mind on this and imposed (as we Westminster types say) a three-line whip on its caucus — the movies, the sitcoms, the respectable press. You can dissent for a bit if everyone knows you don't really mean it (the president, whose thinking eventually "evolved" to what everyone knew it was anyway). But, if they think you do mean it, you must be cast out and banished (Carrie Prejean). A societal institution that predates the United States by thousands of years is being fundamentally redefined, and elected politicians are entirely irrelevant to the process.
Cultural pressures extend to the boardroom, too. "BP" stands for "British Petroleum," but for the decade before that unfortunate Gulf spill their slogan was "BP — beyond petroleum": They were an oil company ashamed of being an oil company. Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount, and other mom-'n'-pop operations demonized corporations as evil, and oil corporations as especially so, and so BP felt obliged to pretend in public that they spend 99 percent of their R&D budget trying to run a Honda Civic on bovine flatulence.
Meanwhile, American conservatives devote their energies to gassing up the Republican party's tank enough to get it across the finish line every other November. It's a very reductive view of the purpose of politics, even when it works. This year it didn't work, and the usual tragedy degenerated into trouser-dropping farce: We thought we were arguing Obamacare and the economy and crippling debt, and they thought it was about sexist Republicans forcing contraceptiveless women back into their binders. And they were right. At a certain level, this is ridiculous: It's like strolling onto the court into your tennis whites, playing a pretty good match, and discovering in the final serve of the final set that everyone else thinks it's a game of buzkashi with you as the goat carcass.
Culture trumps politics. Culture trumps economics. On November 6, culture trumped reality — and delivered, as a Democrat in my state tweeted, "a binderful of awesome!" Binders? "The Life of Julia"? Lena Dunham? We ought to be asking why something so obviously risible was not obviously so to millions of voters.
Because the Left understands where the real victories are won: Politics is a battle, but culture is the war.

Trusting your own government (or not)

Return to the Article

January 31, 2013

By John Harvey

Earlier this month, Geraldo Rivera asked a caller: "How could you not trust your own government?"
Putting aside big and little episodes of untrustworthy government in the history of this country like the Trail of Tears, the internment of Americans of Japanese descent, Kent State, Waco, Fast and Furious, and the Benghazi Coverup, Rivera implies the burden of proof lies with the skeptical citizen when it comes to trust. But his question only diverts our attention. The issue isn't the relative peace in the body politic at this instant. The question Geraldo asks really goes to the heart of the very nature of our government.

History is full of governments that ran sufficiently amok that they become a mortal danger to their own citizens. Such governments did not last. Indeed, the last century was so full of episodes of different governments murdering their own citizens by deliberate official policy that it spawned a new word: democide.
Many in the media and academia who largely reject American Exceptionalism want us to believe instead that our government is exceptional in light of the history of governments. In how easily they dismiss the Second Amendment as being obsolete, they are telling us that there are no circumstances whatsoever in which some future American government would ever turn feral. They are willing to stake the lives of their children and grandchildren on that assertion.
Certainly people want a trustworthy and competent government. But it concerns me that more than one member of the president's inner circle has publicly praised China's Mao, a man responsible for the brutal deaths of over 40 million Chinese citizens. I am shocked that a close advisor to the president has favorably quoted Mao's warning that [political] power comes from the barrel of a gun. It is chilling to see a Mao-themed ornament on a White House Christmas tree, or the number of supporters of this administration who also voice approval of the murderous Che Guevara. It is incongruous that a man who was a leader of a group of radical socialists who contemplated murdering 25 million Americans should they reject postrevolutionary ideological reeducation is now a frequent visitor to the White House.
Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security is busy stockpiling two billion rounds of hollow point pistol ammunition. The very government that Geraldo implies we must trust is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a contingency plan that cannot be explained by any current trends. The shocking implied question is not only who does DHS intent to shoot, but under what circumstances? Even if this plan devoted 100 rounds to each anticipated target, two billion rounds implies violent action by government against 20 million of its 310 million citizens. Is this the same 20 or so million the Weather Underground leader who now visits the White House anticipated needing to eliminate?
How should we rationally evaluate these facts? As disconnected random coincidences or as a glimpse of the plans of those in power and those who cheer them on? As long as the relationship between public servants and the public they serve is healthy, then we all can enjoy the blessings of liberty, which was the core reason the federal government was formed over 200 years ago.
But what happens when the public servant starts to think he is the public master instead?
Nobody can predict how a future government might endanger our own descendants by running amok. For example, what social, political, or legal forces exist today that would stop another Trail of Tears that were not sufficient to stop it the first time? Certainly firearms aren't the answer to every outrage, or even most. Even though we are all civilized and strive to be peaceful and polite to everyone, we cannot allow the precious right to keep and bear arms to be crippled with my generation, any more than we could allow the right of free speech to be crippled. Our future grandchildren might curse us for neglecting to preserve the very tools they might need most during some urgent crisis in their lives, even though no learned member of the news media could possibly envision such a thing at this moment.
The philosopher Karl Popper offers us some guidance. In Volume 2 of his The Open Society and Its Enemies, he wrote:

"...the use of violence is justified only under a tyranny which makes reforms without violence impossible, and it should have only one aim, that is, to bring about a state of affairs which make reforms without violence possible."

Can a government whose bureaucracy carefully hoards 2 billion rounds of ammunition in a country of some 310 million citizens be trusted to plan to implement "reforms" without violence? Only oppressive socialist governments attempt such agendas. It is more commonly called "reeducation." How does Geraldo's question relate to such a plan, indeed to a government potentially with this manner of plan? Because it is not the duty of any democratic government to reform citizens, is the rational "contingency" being planned for that too many citizens will refuse to comply with government edicts that are yet to be made public?
Americans reached this point at one time in the history of the land they settled when the edicts of the government of England became too injurious and offensive at too many levels. Are we, who always put on our seat belts lest we have a crash, and avoid trans-fats lest we get clogged arteries, who always brush and floss, and who always do so many other things to avoid all the little and rare risks of life, are we not going to think for one moment that the government we depend upon to do its job competently, will never acquire a different attitude about what its job is and who is in charge? That government could never have an authoritarian seizure, or tell us one thing when its leaders intend on something entirely different, or even decide that it had the power to sterilize or assassinate its own citizens, or just take their children away for flimsy reasons or think it actually needed to use some of those rounds it is stockpiling -- that this could never, ever happen in all history to come?
I find it ironic that a British subject, in the form of a smug CNN anchor, is artfully scolding and lecturing American guests on his show about their support for the right to keep and bear arms. I recall a time when the finest award-winning journalists of their time, like the New York Time's own Walter Duranty, could not bring themselves to report that Stalin was deliberately starving millions of Ukrainian farmers to death as an act of government policy. Did Duranty and the Times choose to dissemble because they believed they were serving a higher cause at the time? Do members of the media lie about firearms because they are serving a higher cause today? And when some future government they support runs wild and thousands (or millions) die, how will the media report it? The same way they glowingly talk about the exploits of Che Guevara or Bill Ayers, whom they tell us is just a neighbor of the current president?
In related news, the UK Telegraph carried a story on January 25, 2013 concenring Google Earth satellite photos of North Korea's vast system of political prison camps and prison cities. The paper reports, "Inmates -- who can be imprisoned for life, along with three generations of their families, for anything deemed to be critical of the regime -- are forced to survive by eating rats and picking corn kernels out of animal waste..."
And Israel National News reports that a new exhibit opened at Yad Vashem to mark 2013 Holocaust Memorial Day: "...the exhibit represents only an example of more than 71,000 items donated by thousands of people over the last two years as a way of perpetuating the memory of relatives who perished during the Holocaust...."
Photo credit: Creative Commons

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Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Bring in the closer on A-Rod saga...the feds

If MLB is going to clean up its sport, the government has to go after Anthony Bosch, his clinic and his 'patients' -- including the Yankees' Alex Rodriguez

If you are one who believes that what the juicers have done is a form of athletic fraud, then you should want the government to get to the bottom of this with Alex Rodriguez

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2013, 12:28 AM

http://www.nydailynews.com

New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez (13) Batting practice. New York Yankees vs. Baltimore ALDS Game 2. Monday October 8, 2012. Baltimore, Maryland. (Corey Sipkin/New York Daily News)

COREY SIPKIN/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Alex Rodriguez wants the world to believe he only used PEDs as a Texas Ranger.

This time when Alex Rodriguez’s name is linked to performance enhancing drugs, he immediately issues a statement through a PR firm saying that it is all a lie and then lawyers up with Roy Black, a Miami guy who is a lot like Alex in the sense that he used to be a lot bigger than he is now.

Oh, you hear it good from A-Rod, through his mouthpieces. You hear how it is all a lie about Rodriguez’s relationship with a guy named Bosch running an “anti-aging” clinic in South Florida, a clinic that the feds and Major League Baseball clearly seem to think is the new BALCO, the Bay Area drug lab that pretty much helped change modern baseball history, the lab that eventually put a padlock in front of the National Baseball Hall of Fame for some of the game’s biggest stars, starting with Mr. Barry Bonds.

RELATED: THE NEW BALCO: A-ROD OTHER BIG-NAME STARS LINKED TO NEW PROBE

Now it is A-Rod linked to Bosch the way Bonds and friends were once linked to BALCO. And somebody needs to give us a reason why we should believe a word Rodriguez says about drugs any more than we believe Lance Armstrong. And why anybody should think that Rodriguez is anything more than the right-handed Bonds.

Once, when first caught as a juicer, Rodriguez expected the world to believe this preposterous, nuanced account of what he said was his limited drug use as a Texas Ranger:

LINDA CATAFFO/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS;PAT SULLIVAN/AP

A-Rod's first story is he only used PEDs in Texas (r.) but not in Seattle (l.) or with the Yankees.

RELATED: HARVEY: QUICK DENIALS MAY SINK A-ROD

That it was the pressure of his $252 million contract that made him do it, that he was just this dumb crazy kid (he was in his mid-20s at the time), that even though he didn’t know exactly what he was taking from some friend or cousin, or what it was doing for him, he continued to do it month after month for three years.

It is a version of things for suckers. We were also expected to believe he was squeaky clean after that, expected to believe that in 2007, when he had 54 home runs and knocked in 156 for the Yankees — juicy Texas numbers — he was more drug-free than the Betty Ford Clinic.

RELATED: YANKS' EFFORTS TO ESCAPE ALEX FIGURE COULD END UP VOID

Now, despite detailed patient files and payment records and even handwritten notes linking Rodriguez to this “biochemist” Anthony Bosch, about whom you first learned in the Daily News on Saturday morning, Rodriguez clearly intends to make this his word against Bosch’s, even if Bosch eventually flips on him the way Brian McNamee, Roger Clemens’ former trainer, flipped on Clemens.

MIAMI DADE POLICE DEPT.

Anthony Bosch.

You know why McNamee did that, by the way? Not because he was a rat and snitch, but because when he talked to George Mitchell’s investigators for the Mitchell Report, the feds were in the room. And McNamee had been made well aware that you have two choices with the feds in the room: You tell the truth, or you don’t tell anything at all.

PHOTOS: ALEX RODRIGUEZ'S MANY WOMEN

All this time later there is this idea that the government should somehow just look the other way on drug cheats in sports because they couldn’t pin the perjury rap on Clemens that Clemens deserved. But the feds cannot allow Rodriguez to make this just his word against Bosch’s, make this a wretched war fought in A-Rod’s behalf by handlers and crisis managers and spin doctors.

If baseball is going to continue to clean up its sport, something it has done mightily over the last decade, the government has to continue to go after Bosch and his clinic and his “patients.” The government has subpoena power. Major League Baseball certainly does not.

PHOTOS: A-ROD'S 500TH HOME RUN

LANNIS WATERS/THE PALM BEACH POS/POOL

Alex Rodriguez's new attorney, Roy Black.

You may be one of those who didn’t care what Armstrong was taking, doesn’t care if Bonds or Clemens were juiced to the gills. You may be one of those, like Armstrong’s enablers, who fall back now on the defense that Everybody Was Doing It. But if you believe these guys are cheats, if you are one who believes that what the juicers have done is a form of athletic fraud, then you should want the government to get to the bottom of this with Rodriguez and everybody else.

He should have to tell his story under oath, not to Oprah or Katie. “The news report about a purported relationship between Alex Rodriguez and Anthony Bosch are not true,” is the beginning of the statement from Citrick and Company for Rodriguez on Tuesday

He wants you to believe him the way he wanted you to believe him when he came clean in the spring of 2009, after years of his own Armstrong-like denials about drug use. He wants you to believe him now the way he wanted you to believe that Dr. Anthony Galea, the guy he was with before he was with Anthony Bosch, never gave him human growth hormone even though Galea is the patron saint of HGH.

Oh, and of course you were supposed to believe Rodriguez had to import his own sports physician from Canada — Galea — because, hey, we don’t have any good ones in New York. And you were never supposed to believe the stories going around for a couple of years, as Rodriguez has been in decline, that he himself has been going around the country looking for guys who might be able to give him a pick-me-up that modern baseball drug testing would not detect.

Maybe in the end the truth about Rodriguez is that he was juicing from the time he was a kid. It would mean that the real lie isn’t the stories coming out about him now. The real lie would be Alex Rodriguez himself.

Buy Yankees Tickets

Coed Combat Units

A bad idea on all counts

Mackubin Thomas Owens

The Weekly Standard

February 4, 2013, Vol. 18, No. 20

http://www.weeklystandard.com

For over two decades, I have been arguing against the idea of placing American women in combat or in support positions associated with direct ground combat. I base my position on three factors. First, there are substantial physical differences between men and women that place the latter at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to ground combat. Second, men treat women differently than they treat other men. This can undermine the comradeship upon which the unit cohesion necessary to success on the battlefield depends. Finally, the presence of women leads to double standards that seriously erode morale and performance. In other words, men and women are not interchangeable.

Physical Differences

The average female soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is about five inches shorter than her male counterpart and has half the upper body strength, lower aerobic capacity (at her physical peak between the ages of 20 and 30, the average woman has the aerobic capacity of a 50-year-old male), and 37 percent less muscle mass. She has a lighter skeleton, which means that the physical strain on her body from carrying the heavy loads that are the lot of the infantryman may cause permanent damage.

But can’t these differences be reduced? In the past, gender politics has made it difficult—if not impossible—to ascertain exactly what can be done to improve the performance of women, because advocates of gender equity understand that the establishment of objective strength criteria would have a deleterious effect on their demand to open the infantry to women. Several years ago, the Army attempted to establish such strength standards and pretests for each military occupational specialty, but those efforts were abandoned when studies showed that not enough women would meet the standards proposed for many Army jobs. Funding subsequently was denied for a study about remedial strength training for women.

Anatomical differences between men and women are as important as strength differences. A woman cannot urinate standing up. Most important, she tends, particularly if she is under the age of 30 (as are 60 percent of female military personnel) to become pregnant.

Indeed, each year, somewhere between 10 and 17 percent of servicewomen become pregnant. In certain locales, the figure is even higher. Former senator James Webb noted that when he was secretary of the Navy in 1988, 51 percent of single Air Force and 48 percent of single Navy women stationed in Iceland were pregnant. During pregnancy (if she remains in the service at all), a woman must be exempted from progressively more routine duties, such as marching, field training, and swim tests. After the baby is born, there are more problems, as exemplified by the many thousand uniformed-service mothers, none of whom fairly could be called a frontline soldier.

Women also suffer a higher rate of attrition than men from physical ailments, and because of the turnover, are a more costly investment. Women are four times more likely to report ill, and the percentage of women being medically nonavailable at any time is twice that of men. If a woman can’t do her job, someone else must do it for her.

If one doesn’t believe me, perhaps one should look at an article by a Marine officer, Captain Katie Petronio, in the Marine Corps Gazette, the Corps’s professional journal (“Get Over It! We Are Not All Created Equal”). She noted the physical deterioration she suffered during her deployment to Afghanistan as a combat engineer officer:

It was evident that stress and muscular deterioration was affecting everyone regardless of gender; however, the rate of my deterioration was noticeably faster than that of male Marines and further compounded by gender-specific medical conditions. At the end of the 7-month deployment . . . I had lost 17 pounds and was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome (which personally resulted in infertility, but is not a genetic trend in my family), which was brought on by the chemical and physical changes endured during deployment. Regardless of my deteriorating physical stature, I was extremely successful during both of my combat tours, serving beside my infantry brethren and gaining the respect of every unit I supported. Regardless, I can say with 100 percent assurance that despite my accomplishments, there is no way I could endure the physical demands of the infantrymen whom I worked beside as their combat load and constant deployment cycle would leave me facing medical separation long before the option of retirement. I understand that everyone is affected differently; however, I am confident that should the Marine Corps attempt to fully integrate women into the infantry, we as an institution are going to experience a colossal increase in crippling and career-ending medical conditions for females.

Men and Women

The key to success on the battlefield is unit cohesion, which all research has shown to be critically important. Advocates of opening combat specialties to women have tried to change the definition of cohesion over the years, but the best remains that of the 1992 report of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces: “the relationship that develops in a unit or group where (1) members share common values and experiences; (2) individuals in the group conform to group norms and behavior in order to ensure group survival and goals; (3) members lose their identity in favor of a group identity; (4) members focus on group activities and goals; (5) unit members become totally dependent on each other for the completion of their mission or survival; and (6) group members . . . meet all the standards of performance and behavior in order not to threaten group survival.”

The glue of unit cohesion is what the Greeks called philia—friendship, comradeship, or brotherly love. In The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, J. Glenn Gray described the importance of philia: “Numberless soldiers have died, more or less willingly, not for country or honor or religious faith or for any other abstract good, but because they realized that by fleeing their post and rescuing themselves, they would expose their companions to greater danger. Such loyalty to the group is the essence of fighting morale. . . . Comrades are loyal to each other spontaneously and without any need for reasons.”

The Greeks identified another form of love: eros. Unlike philia, eros is individual and exclusive. Eros manifests itself as sexual competition, protectiveness, and favoritism. The presence of women in the close confines of a combat unit unleashes eros at the expense of philia. As the late Charles Moskos, the great military sociologist, once commented, “when you put men and women together in a confined environment and shake vigorously, don’t be surprised if sex occurs. When the military says there can be no sex between a superior and a subordinate, that just flies in the face of reality. You can’t make a principle based on a falsehood.” Mixing the sexes and thereby introducing eros into an environment based on philia creates a dangerous form of friction in the military.

The destructive effect on unit cohesion of amorous relationships can be denied only by ideologues. Does a superior order his or her beloved into danger? If he or she demonstrates favoritism, what are the consequences for unit morale and discipline? What happens when jealousy rears its head? These are questions of life and death.

Feminists contend that these manifestations of eros are the result only of a lack of education and insensitivity to women, and can be eradicated through indoctrination. But all the social engineering in the world cannot change the fact that men treat women differently than they treat other men.

Double Standards

The physical differences between men and women have, unfortunately, all too often caused the military to, in effect, discard the very essence of philia: fairness and the absence of favoritism. This is the crux of the problem. As Webb has observed, “In [the military] environment, fairness is not only crucial, it is the coin of the realm.” The military ethos is dependent on the understanding that the criteria for allocating danger and recognition, both positive and negative, are essentially objective.

Favoritism and double standards are deadly to philia and the associated phenomena—cohesion, morale, discipline—that are critical to the success of a military organization. Not surprisingly, double standards generate resentment on the part of military men, which in turn leads to cynicism about military women in general, including those who have not benefited from a double standard and who perform their duties with distinction.

The military has created two types of double standards. The first is the tendency to allow women, but not men, to take advantage of sexual differences. For instance, morale, trust, and cohesion have suffered from the perception among military men that women can use pregnancy to avoid duty or deployments. A very contentious debate over favoritism arose some years ago over the claim that some women had been permitted to advance in flight training with performances that would have caused a man to wash out.

The second type of double standard is based on differing physical requirements. Last week, after Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that the ban on women in combat would be lifted, my good friend, retired Air Force general Charlie Dunlap, a former JAG and the director of Duke Law School’s Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, weighed in: “Secretary Panetta’s decision to lift the ban on women serving in certain combat roles makes sense so long as there is no lowering of the physical or other standards required for the new positions.”

The trouble is that the desire for equal opportunity is, in practice, usually translated into a demand for equal results. Consequently, there has been a watering down of standards to accommodate the generally lower physical capabilities of women. This has had two consequences.

First, standards have been reduced so much that, in many cases, service members no longer are being prepared for the strenuous challenges they will face in the fleet or field. Second—and even more destructive of morale and trust—is the fact that when the requirement can’t be changed and the test cannot be eliminated, scores are “gender normed” to conceal the differences between men and women. All the services have lower physical standards for women than for men. Two decades ago, the U.S. Military Academy identified 120 physical differences between men and women, not to mention psychological ones, that resulted in a less rigorous overall program of physical training at West Point in order to accommodate female cadets.

For instance, the “USMA Report on the Integration and Performance of Women at West Point,” prepared for the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services in February 1992, revealed that scores for physically demanding events were gender normed at the academy: A woman could receive an A for the same performance that would earn a man a D. Navy women can achieve the minimum score on the physical readiness test by performing 11 percent fewer sit-ups and 53 percent fewer push-ups and by running 1.5 miles 27 percent more slowly than men. There is immense political pressure to prevent women from failing to meet even these reduced standards.

To argue against women in combat is not to deny the significant contributions women have made to the nation’s defense. For the last century, women have served honorably, competently, and bravely during this country’s wars. It is my experience that the vast majority of women in today’s armed forces are extremely professional and want nothing to do with the two extremes of feminism that Jean Bethke Elshtain described several years ago in Real Politics: At the Center of Everyday Life and that the military spends time and effort trying to appease: the “feminist victimization wing” and the “repressive androgynists.”

I doubt that there is a huge push on the part of female soldiers and Marines to join the infantry. Captain Petronio makes the same point. The impetus comes instead from professional feminists still living in the 1970s and a small number of female officers who believe that serving in the infantry will increase the likelihood that they will become generals. But the Pentagon itself points out that military women are already promoted at rates equal to or faster than men.

In short, there is no reason for this change. It doesn’t make the military stronger, and risks making it weaker by undermining the factors crucial for combat effectiveness.

Mackubin Thomas Owens is editor of Orbis, the journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and a Marine infantry veteran of Vietnam.

Senator Rubio's Immigration Enforcement Fantasy

Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy On January 29, 2013 @ 1:26 pm In Uncategorized | 37 Comments

PJ Media

http://pjmedia.com

The silly season is upon us again, which is to say: Washington finds itself in yet another debate over “comprehensive immigration reform.”
The core silliness could be heard in the arguments of Marco Rubio, one of four Republicans in the Senate “Gang of Eight” urging a deal that purports to ensure real immigration enforcement in exchange for legalization of status and an ultimate “path to citizenship” for millions of illegal immigrants. Earlier this afternoon, Sen. Rubio was interviewed by Rush Limbaugh.
Sen. Rubio admirably insisted, “We need border security. We need workplace enforcement. We need a visa tracking system.” But, as Rush pointed out, President Obama is outlining his own vision of immigration reform in Las Vegas today, and it promises to diverge in a fundamental way from the Gang of Eight proposal: The president has no interest in immigration enforcement. He wants only the legalization goodies for current illegals and the incentives they’ll inevitably create for more illegal immigration. He is not interested in the protections for the American people that Sen. Rubio touts.
Sen. Rubio confidently responded that if the president makes such a pitch, he will have a huge problem with his own party — in particular, with Sen. Chuck Schumer and the other Gang of Eight Democrats who’ve supposedly committed their party to meaningful enforcement measures. This contention is absurd. It suggests that Sen. Rubio either does not understand how the federal government works (highly unlikely for a man of Rubio’s obvious intelligence), or is making a monumental miscalculation — elevating over the certain-to-be-damaging consequences of his proposal the futile hope that Republicans will win lasting accolades from the pro-illegal immigration Obamedia.
The executive branch is in charge of law enforcement, period. Congress cannot enforce the law and cannot compel the president to do so. And we already know there will be no meaningful immigration enforcement as long as President Obama is running the executive branch. As usual in Washington’s progressive crusades, we are expected to forget all relevant history — in this instance, not only the sorry history of the 1986 amnesty (in which Washington predictably provided all the legalization goodies but reneged on the enforcement promises) but also the Obama administration’s more recent, more virulent anti-enforcement record.
Can Sen. Rubio have missed the Obama Justice Department’s lawsuit against the citizens of Arizona? The state enacted a law that simply reaffirmed the Congress’s own immigration statutes and enabled state police to enforce those federal standards. The Obama administration not only sued the state for enforcing federal law, it did so by positing a radical new understanding of the “pre-emption” doctrine. Formerly, that doctrine stood for the proposition that the states could not enact laws that contradicted properly enacted federal statutes. Under Obama’s interpretation, the states were precluded from enacting laws that contradicted U.S. executive branch enforcement policy even if they were completely consistent U.S. congressional law.
Thus, according to Obama, if the president’s policy is to refrain from enforcing Congress’s statutes, sovereign states may not enforce them either, even if such non-feasance renders the states defenseless against the tide of illegal immigration overrunning their borders and budgets. It matters not, in this radical view, that self-defense is a basic aspect of sovereignty or that, if the Obama preemption theory had been evident in the Constitution, there would be no United States because the states would never have ratified it.
That is how committed Pres. Obama is to non-enforcement. Consequently, it is the height of foolishness for Sen. Rubio to talk about fissures between the administration and Congressional Democrats on enforcement measures. Chuck Schumer has nothing to do with enforcing the immigration laws. Even if he and his colleagues were serious about enforcement — and, as Mark Krikorian and Mickey Kausexplain, the enforcement promises in the Gang of Eight proposal are patently fraudulent — their earnestness would be irrelevant. Obama has not only posited but argued in the Supreme Court that federal statutes are trivial; the only thing that matters is raw executive power: his unfettered discretion in choosing to enforce or not enforce the law.
That being the case, what is the point of the Gang of Eight exercise? The Republicans pushing the deal tout its illusory enforcement measures, but even if these were real lawmakers are not in a position to compel the president to execute them. And think about it: it is precisely because the law is not being enforced in the first place that the senators perceive the need to promise law enforcement as a premise for the windfall illegal aliens would get from the Gang of Eight proposal. If the laws already on the books are not being enforced, why on earth would anyone think a new law would make a bit of difference — particularly when it would be equally impotent in the matter of forcing Obama’s hand?
In the end, that really is the point. It makes no sense to write a legislative proposal that confers unwarranted benefits on the condition of stepped up law enforcement. If the Republican senators are serious, they should just call for enforcement of already enacted laws. They should tell Democrats, “Show us over the next few years that enforcement is effective and that the government’s commitment to it is permanent; then we can talk about legislation to legalize the presence of the remaining illegal immigrant population.” The way you prioritize enforcement is … to prioritize enforcement, not to talk about enforcement you can’t deliver in a wayward deal that concretely rewards lawlessness. And in the meantime, if it would help our economy to allow more immigration of workers to fill needs that aren’t being met, by all means increase the availability of visas for those categories of workers — as dramatically as necessary. This will illustrate that Republicans are not anti-immigrant — the “false argument” that animates Sen. Rubio, as he told Rush. It is a slander that sticks because of the GOP’s inadequate response to the Left’s demagoguery, not because of bad policies.
I take Sen. Rubio at his word that he wants immigration laws enforced and thinks enforcement is the foundation of a humane immigration policy (even though I vigorously disagree with his contention that the Gang of Eight proposal makes real enforcement a condition of valuable benefits). But it is impossible to take seriously any proposal that entrusts enforcement to President Obama. If you’re serious about enforcement, you can take no other position than that any consideration of making legal-status concessions to illegal immigrants must await a new president who can be trusted to honor his oath to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
Finally, I note that nothing I’ve argued here alters my previously stated position that immigration enforcement should primarily be a state responsibility. I do not understand how Republicans can purport to be “Constitutional conservatives” and skip past the inconvenient fact that the Constitution empowers Congress only to set the qualifications of citizenship, not to police immigration. The framers intended immigration enforcement to be among the plethora of internal matters be handled by the states — with the federal government obliged to assist states in the event they were threatened with being overrun by trespassers.
I believe that returning immigration enforcement to the states would result in the most sensible and humane immigration policy. States that wished to be sanctuaries for non-citizens would be able to do that, provided they were willing to pay for the attendant largesse themselves. States that preferred vigorous enforcement could follow that policy. States would set their enforcement and social-welfare policies in accordance with their economic conditions. Aliens would gravitate to hospitable areas and avoid places where they were not welcome. There would be no centralized, one-size-fits-all policy but different standards based on local conditions fashioned by the citizens who were most effected — and easily changed if conditions changed.
Unfortunately, Washington and the federal courts decided, a century-plus into our constitutional history, that we had somehow evolved beyond that framework. The states and most conservatives have gone along for the ride. Thus we continue the folly of favoring a single, universal policy that is based on the hope for law-enforcement by a president who is both committed to non-enforcement and apathetic when it comes to the very different hardships that beset different states.

Article printed from Ordered Liberty: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2013/01/29/senator-rubios-immigration-enforcement-fantasy/

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Film Review: 'Lincoln'

HOUSE DIVIDED

“Lincoln.”

by Anthony Lane
The New YorkerNOVEMBER 19, 2012

Daniel Day-Lewis, in Steven Spielberg’s movie: a man who reaches out to the people he leads while seeming lost in himself. Illustration by Ricardo Martinez.

“Lincoln” tells an honest tale of Abe. For most of the movie, we join the sixteenth President (Daniel Day-Lewis) in early 1865, as he seeks to wrestle the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution through the House of Representatives. The Senate passed the amendment, outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude, in April, 1864. Now comes a rougher task, with obstacles deployed on every flank. The problem is not the opposition—Democrats such as Fernando Wood (Lee Pace), a former mayor of New York, who wanted the city to secede from the Union and reap a continuing profit from its cotton trade with the Confederacy. The problem is fellow-Republicans, notably Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), whose perpetual head of abolitionist steam is enough to blow his wig off. He believes in racial equality in the eyes of God, not merely, as the amendment suggests, before the law. How can so fervid a figure be reined in?

“Lincoln,” written by Tony Kushner, directed by Steven Spielberg, and derived in part from Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals,” is a curious beast. The title suggests a monolith, as if going to this movie were tantamount to visiting Mt. Rushmore, and the running time, of two and a half hours, prepares you for an epic. Yet the film is a cramped and ornery affair, with Spielberg going into lockdown mode even more thoroughly than he did in “The Terminal.” As befits a chamber piece, we pass from one chamber to the next: from the crowded floor of the House to the Lincolns’ bedroom, a hospital ward, and the study where Stevens likes to browbeat lesser men. Then, there is the carriage with curtained windows, in which a Southern delegation, led by Alexander Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley), Vice-President of the Confederate States, travels north in secret (and in vain), to discuss a peace deal—peace being the first thing that Lincoln prays for and the last thing he needs right now, before the amendment is passed.

Stephens was a ferrety fellow, often in poor health, and Haley is an alarmingly close match. Almost all the actors in “Lincoln” map neatly onto their characters, aside from Hal Holbrook, who looks too cushioned and comfortable for the role of Francis Preston Blair, the architect of the failed peace agreement, and a dead ringer for Nosferatu. Still, it’s only proper that the guy who played Deep Throat should show up, because “Lincoln” devotes itself to shenanigans in smoke-filled rooms, with most of the smoke emerging from the cigar of Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn), whose close, confiding affection for Lincoln is well caught. No one is happier in this fug than Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s cinematographer, who veils events in such a rarefied and sifted haze that they seem already poised halfway to myth. Just look at the President, haloed and framed against a window, in semi-silhouette, as he sits in a rocking chair reading to his young son Tad (Gulliver McGrath). They could be in a picture book themselves.

Because of scenes like that, “Lincoln” becomes a fight. There is physical conflict, but it seems perfunctory: first, a murderous opening scrap between black and Confederate regiments, invested by Kaminski with the staccato desperation that he brought to “Saving Private Ryan,” and then, much later, a corpse-littered battlescape. The true tussle of the movie, however, is between the Spielberg who, like a cinematic Sandburg, is drawn aloft toward legend—hardly an uncommon impulse when dealing with Lincoln—and the Spielberg who is tugged down by Kushner’s intricate screenplay toward documentary grit. You can never tell which of the two tendencies, the visionary or the revisionist, will come out on top. Thus, on the one hand we have a John Williams score, all plaintive piano solos and sobbing horns, that could have been composed thirty years ago. In the same vein, our first sight of Lincoln is from behind, the radiance of his fame being too much to contemplate head on, and we even get a foolish coda, with our hero manifested like an angel through a flickering candle flame, as if the film were unable to leave him be. On the other hand, we get Tommy Lee Jones smacking his lips over slices of succulent speech: “We find the mephitic fumes of his oratory a lethal challenge to our pulmonaries,” he growls, staring down the hapless Wood in the House. Then, there is James Spader, an actor too little used of late, plucking a peach of a part—W. N. Bilbo, one of a trio of enforcers, hired by Seward to bully wavering House voters as the day of reckoning nears. Resplendent in whiskers and purple waistcoat, Spader enjoys every minute, haring to the White House mid-debate to beg a note from the President, and greeting the great man, as he pays a visit to the enforcers’ hideaway, with the cheery words “Well, I’ll be fucked!”

Lincoln is undeterred. “I wouldn’t bet against it,” he replies, with a knowing grin. It is in Day-Lewis, needless to say, that this tension between the high and the homespun coheres. One glance at his walk tells you what sort of fresh ground the performance intends to break. Not for him the long, commanding stride that carried Henry Fonda through John Ford’s “Young Mr. Lincoln” but a singular shuffle, half comic, half sorrowful, like that of a man hastening to catch up with a funeral procession and threatening at any instant to tip over and fall on his nose. The voice, too, is pitched a good octave above Fonda’s, yet how swiftly we are lulled into its anecdotal ease. “I heard tell once,” he begins, and the roomful of listeners is hushed in expectation. In a way, that is not far from Ford, although he would not have countenanced the superb moment when Spielberg, eager to crack the spell, has Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill), the Secretary of War, peel away in exasperation as Lincoln halts a busy night—they are waiting for news, by wire, from the shelling outside Wilmington—to launch into yet another fondly polished tale.

We can only imagine how Liam Neeson, a gruffer presence, who for a long while was Spielberg’s choice of leading man, would have fared as Lincoln; and I hope one day to see Viggo Mortensen, whose bone structure has the right sad concavity, impress himself on the role. What we derive from Day-Lewis, though, is the mysterious—and accurate—sense of a man who by instinct and by expertise reaches out to the people he leads while seeming lost in himself. Could that be why he buffs his own boots, even when his valet is beside him? Some of his frowns, like his conspiratorial smiles, exist less in response to others than for the benefit of private rumination, and the film has barely begun before he is quoting Hamlet, on bad dreams, in the midst of a chat with his wife, Mary (Sally Field). Later, there is a contretemps with his son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who wishes to enlist. This flimsy subplot is beside the point—it could have been junked entirely—and yet, when Lincoln discusses the matter with Mary, the result is all the more distressing because the President’s harshest quarrel is not with her but with his conscience, and with his mortal thoughts. Just as the fracas over the Thirteenth Amendment has to carry the symbolic flag for Lincoln’s lifelong quest, so the spectacle of one married couple raging over whether their child should fight, and whether he might die, crystallizes the fears of a generation. Through sickness, infant fatality, and military service, these folk lived more closely with death than we can ever know.

At the end of the scene, Sally Field sinks beautifully to the ground, the hooped skirt of her pale dress subsiding around her like a balloon. Here, we feel, is the authentic sigh of exhaustion, emanating from a woman wracked not just by headaches but by the pressure of public performance—the unremitting demand, imposed upon her husband, for words and deeds. (To her, reëlection means “four more years in this terrible house.” That may get a dry laugh in some quarters.) Many viewers may share her vexation, for “Lincoln” is unapologetically packed with eloquence, loud and soft. The President’s speech to his Cabinet, explaining why the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 may be insufficient, comes embellished with cadenzas of legal nicety, and lasts as long as an aria. But there is nothing inherently undramatic about a surge of talk; movies as different as “His Girl Friday” and “My Night at Maud’s” exert the tightest of grips, and a Lincoln film that paid inadequate heed to the forces of rhetoric would be like a porno film that stopped at the bedroom door. Nevertheless, you can sense Spielberg’s relief as the dialogue dwindles to a crisp minimum (“War’s nearly done. Ain’t that so?” Lincoln asks), or when voices die down altogether and the glow of images takes hold. Hence the firelit sight of Tad handling photographs, on frail glass plates, of children much the same age as him, though of another color, with prices marked “Two young boys. $700.” Hence, too, the shot of Lincoln—it should have been the closing shot of the movie—ambling down a hallway on what will be his last night out. The lofty, stooping figure heads away from us, with his back to the camera, but he doesn’t get any smaller as he goes. As Tolstoy said of Lincoln, in 1908, “We are still too near to his greatness.” Ain’t that so? ♦

Earl Weaver: Words from a baseball master

By Thomas Boswell, Published: January 19

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

In the 1970s, when female reporters were first allowed in baseball locker rooms, I was leaving Earl Weaver’s office one night after his smart, sarcastic postmortem of a tough Orioles defeat. I realized that the only woman on the beat, a relative newcomer, had missed Weaver’s performance.
Entering his office as we all left, she looked worried. Weaver dressed down reporters for dumb questions and at times demanded what you would have done — and why — before he would give his own answer. His office was sometimes a funny place, but also electric with tension: Baseball spoken here.
Eavesdropping is a clubhouse sin. But I wanted to see how cruel Weaver might be. To that point, I’d never met anyone in baseball with much grasp that a female journalist had every right to be there.
“So,” said Weaver, businesslike, “do you want it all or just the highlights?” And he started repeating his best answers as she wrote.
Earl Weaver died late Friday night at 82. Whatever you think he was, you’re right. But he was probably also, to some degree, the opposite as well. Whenever you assumed he was a man of his time, defined and limited by immersion in his sport, he often showed he was ahead of the times and also, frequently, ahead of his sport.
In death, we will see images of his tirades at umpires, be reminded of his funny wisecracks and of his sense of strategy that predated several “Moneyball” theories by a generation. We’ll see a hard, smart man with a Chesapeake crab’s shell, little social polish and a need to overcompensate for his lack of size and ability as a minor league ballplayer. We all saw that.
But in nine years of covering the Orioles beat, I saw another Weaver, one that doesn’t contradict the first, but rather broadens him. He didn’t open up often, but when he did, you were floored. He knew himself — why he was who he was and why he managed the way he did — as well as anyone I ever covered. We knew he had examined baseball and hadn’t missed much. But he’d also examined himself and analyzed in detail everyone around him, too.
The distance Weaver kept from his players, with no desire whatsoever to be their friend, but rather to be their leader, was his defining trait to me. That distance gave him authority and made every day at the park feel just a little bit dangerous. What would Earl do? What might he not do, if he felt like it? No contemporary team, in my experience, was on its toes in the sense that Weaver’s Orioles always were.
Reggie Jackson only played one season for Weaver but said: “I loved the little Weave. If you made a mental mistake, you saw him waiting for you on the top step of the dugout when you came back in. He’d just say one word, ‘Why?’ And you better have an answer. On his team, if you didn’t ‘think the game,’ you had a problem. He was right in your face.”
“We are all on speaking terms. We have a little rapport. Not too much,” Weaver told me, regarding his relationships with his players. “You learn the lesson the first day in Class D [what the lowest rung of the minor leagues was once called]. You’re always going to be a rotten bastard, or in my case, a little bastard, as long as you manage. That’s the rule. To keep your job, you fire others or bench them or trade them. You have to do the thinking for 25 guys and you can’t be too close to any of them.”
Weaver never allowed managing to be a pleasure to him. It was work. And while he loved a loose, goofy clubhouse with characters and high jinks, one where you argued and let off steam one day, then started fresh with clean air the next, he never pretended to be a friend to anyone except his coaches. Every star he ever had “except Brooks Robinson,” ended up denouncing him, refusing to believe it when The End came to their careers.
That strain, of being a true authority figure, is perhaps the main reason his career was so short. He retired at 52, was begged and bribed back, but retired for good at 56. Two other reporters and I sat in the dugout one evening in ’86 before a game when Weaver began ruminating on how he returned but couldn’t fix the team and knew it and should quit. Then he said he had to go see the general manager and he left.
“Did Earl just decide to retire?” we asked each other. He did at the end of the ’86 season.
For Weaver, the strain of the game was his certainty that he was often one of the few adults in the room. “You must remember that anyone under 30 — especially a ballplayer — is an adolescent,” he once told me. “I never got close to being an adult until I was 32. Even though I was married and had a son at 20, I was a kid at 32, living at home with my parents. Sure, I was a manager then. That doesn’t mean you’re grown up.
“Until you’re the person that other people fall back on, until you’re the one that’s leaned on, not the person doing the leaning, you’re not an adult. You reach an age when suddenly you realize you have to be that person. Divorce did it to me. It could be elderly parents, children . . . anything. But one day you realize, ‘It’s me. I’ve got to be the rock.’ ”
Finally, he got sick of being that rock, never showing his players how much he cared about them, always being the adult bringing bad news. No manager ever yearned for retirement more than Weaver.
“I know exactly what I need to live on, have since ’57. I’m always going to do the same things. I grow all my own vegetables. I stuff my own sausages. Pork shoulders will be coming on sale next month. I look for chuck roast on sale to use in stew or grind up for hamburgers,” Weaver said. “Doing that takes time and I enjoy it. I’ll have plenty [of money] to play golf every day, run out to Hialeah or the dogs, take [wife] Marianna out to dinner in Fort Lauderdale, and take a walk on the beach. . . .
“I don’t want to spend my whole life watching the sun go down behind the left field bleachers.”
Weaver’s Orioles were always amazed that he retired so young, stayed in Florida and always seemed content, especially compared to the constantly wired Earl of Baltimore, whenever they saw him again. They assumed he was worried about his health or didn’t want his ritual postgame drinking, to unwind after games, to get the better of him. What they missed was his wisdom. One of his owners, the distinguished lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, talked constantly about “competition living” and how little else mattered. Weaver looked at him amused and grew tomatoes in the bullpen.
Many will remember him for his wins, his arguments and his quips. “I gave Mike Cuellar more chances than my first wife.” Or, on seeing slumping Al Bumbry heading to chapel services, cracking, “Take your bat.” He never met an authority figure, in a blue ump’s uniform or a general manager’s office or a state trooper’s cruiser, that didn’t bring out the hell raiser in him.
That’s Earl. But there was plenty more. He thought about everything in baseball with a unique freshness, as if it was unexamined before he arrived. He loved to analyze the psychology of his players, adding every new detail to his mental portrait. And, in a game where consistency is worshipped, he actually enjoyed changing his mind, reworking the puzzle.
“Why?” we asked him.
“Everything changes everything,” he said.
And now that he’s gone, even more so.

For previous columns by Thomas Boswell, visit washingtonpost.com/
boswell.
More on Earl Weaver: Boswell recalls his favorite Weaver quotes Davey Johnson reflects upon death of mentor Obituary: Former Orioles skipper dies at 82