Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
So today is Opening Day
Well not really, baseball began its season last week with a two-game series between the Dodgers and Cubs in Tokyo but you get the idea.
There are plenty of pieces out there about the day, everywhere from the umpteenth predictions to the “Does Baseball S*ck?” However I’m not going to do a George Will-type poseur piece like “Why The Pitch Clock Violates Natural Law” or “How Federalist 68 Predicted the Free Agent Era.” Just some memories about baseball, family, and home.
These are in Maryland, a few miles outside of DC…they generally bloom a few days later than the ones at the Tidal Basin. I’m guessing peak bloom by this weekend.
In football, “chipping” is when an offensive player makes brief contact with an onrushing defender. The goal is not to halt them or apply a full-on block but to delay the other player just long enough to slow their scheme and allow the offense to make a play.
We need to remember that media people may claim to be “reporters,” but the fact that they file “stories” is closer to the real truth, which is that events are merely plot devices used to move the preferred narrative (story) along. It’s always been this way, think “Remember the Maine.”
So having gotten that out of the way, let’s deal with the unfolding story regarding how, allegedly, a media type got access to a principal’s call re: military strikes against the Houthis.
My introduction to the story came yesterday when somebody alerted me to a story in Politico. I found it strange that despite their assigning four reporters to the story, Politico was in fact only following up on a story broken by The Atlantic. Also the entire Politico story, nearly 1,000 words, was about reporting the reaction to The Atlantic. All those words, all that manpower, and they added nothing really of value.
I’ll have more of these, and there is some tangential discussion below, but these are the first few that come to mind. With the possible exception of the final one, they aren’t likely to be pursued by either the legacy media or red/blue partisans.
Eight weeks in to Trump 47 and the Left is in complete disarray.
As Insty and some others have pointed out, it seems that on every issue where the country is split 80/20 – like, say, trans-identifying men in women’s sports, or deporting illegal immigrant gang bangers – the Left unerringly picks the 20% side of the equation. That tells me as a group that they have lost their collective external framework of reality and are now acting reflexively. It’s like poking a drunken hobo with a stick, the hobo’s reaction is as predictable as it is mindless. The fact that it’s Trump holding the stick just makes it more amusing.
James Carville’s suggestion that the Democrats should just sit back a bit and let the Trump 47 Offensive run out of momentum is not only smart politics (never get in the way of a train), but it would force everyone on the Left to take a badly needed mental timeout. No such luck.
The fact that they have basically exiled Carville and now look to do the same with Schumer, the man who is the Left’s only elected power base left in DC, is just further validation that they are nuts.