Here’s a joke. It’s from the late Mitch Hedberg: “I write jokes for a living, I sit at my hotel at night, I think of something that’s funny, then I go get a pen and I write it down. Or if the pen is too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of ain’t funny.” Mitch’s jokes tended to be brief, but they were often quite thoughtful. Jerry Seinfeld, one of the greatest comedy talents in modern history, also wrote his jokes down, too. (Who doesn’t, I guess?) At the Wall Street Journal, John Jurgensen has a fun item on Seinfeld tied to his new Netflix special, where Seinfeld opens his archives and shows how he dissects jokes on legal pads:
Just make me a bicycle, clown! One of the dumber online retorts is “Stick to _______!” It’s a lazy form of disagreement. It’s frequently lobbed at sportswriters, since they tend to be left-leaning and have been for … pretty much ever. It’s also lobbed at writers with opinions to “just report the facts!” (Yet nobody alive seems to remember such a time when this actually was reality.)
Yes, we’re talking about the NFL and #TakeaKnee. You know who got fired for taking a knee? This public high school football coach! How about that, huh? Well, that’s sort of an entirely different issue, but… WHY DO YOU HATE PRAYER? I thought we were talking about Colin Kaepernick? Wait. What are we talking about?
This is how online discourse, if you can call it that, takes place these days. It reminds me of that scene from Wedding Crashers where Vince Vaughan’s character is making balloon animals and a bratty kid demands a bicycle.
The Politicize All The Things™ and You Will Be Made to Care™ movements were humming along quite nicely long before Trump entered the scene, but his comments before this weekend’s games created a frenzy. And in the era of Trump, all of this tribalism is on steroids. There’s nothing we can do about it, except be true to ourselves. Which is why I recommend Jason Gay’s column at the Wall Street Journal on this weekend’s days-long whataboutism revival:
Gay’s conclusion is worth reflecting on: “Politics are exhausting, especially now, and I’d have loved to have to steered clear of them and stuck to sports. But politics have barged down the door. And they look like they’re going to stay for a very long while.”
Sports have always been political. What’s more, I don’t want to live in a world where sports writers “just stick to sports.” That would be a very boring and sad place, if it could ever exist (like the fantasy land where news never had any bias.) I would, however, like to live in a world where people don’t respond to the matter at hand with an insult and change the subject because they’re too afraid to get down. That’s about as likely to happen as a place where people just “stick to sports” or “report the news.” Our world is not black and white, in some ways it’s more transparent, and it’s also more opaque, and the ones with the self-professed clearest world view, oddly enough, are the blindest.
Anthony Weiner headed to jail. What a long, strange trip it’s been, and it ends with 21 months in the big house for Anthony Weiner. If you watch anything today relating to Weiner, watch this video. It’s the late Andrew Breitbart hijacking Anthony Weiner’s press conference, back before his eponymous site tarnished his name at the hands of Steve Bannon. It’s such a classic video. I remember watching it from my office in the Longworth House Office Building. Weiner’s old office where some of the pictures were taken, was right. across. the. hall. Except that Weiner had gotten a better office and this one now belonged to a female Republican from the Midwest. The joke on the floor was that after Weiner fessed up, the member’s suite had all of its chairs replaced. (The story was too good to check.)
Let’s stick to sports here, shall we? Iowa has never been a rival of my Ohio State Buckeyes, but you gotta share some love to a fellow member of the B1G for this: a children’s hospital that overlooks Kinnick Stadium, where fans have started a tradition of turning around and waving to the patients in unison. Steve Czaban has a good point:
Except I have an amended take: Why limit it to children? In Cleveland, where I am from, the stadium where the Browns play was actually funded by sin taxes, which is to say taxes on alcohol and cigarettes. Make sure there’s a wing for adults with lung cancer and liver failure, after all, they paid for the stadium. The least the owners can do is let the fans down one last time.
Illinois Gubernatorial Hopeful Divests Running Mate. You don’t see this every day. Daniel Biss, a Democrat running for governor of Illinois, has sacked his running mate. (He is one of nine in the Democratic primary field.) His choice? Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, an alderman from Chicago who is also an avowed socialist. How much worse can it get than picking a socialist? Well, it came down to the issue of Israel and the Ramirez-Rosa’s support of the BDS movement:
As Tablet reports, Ramirez-Rosa voted for BDS at the 2017 convention of the Democratic Socialists of America. But “claimed that his difference of opinion regarding BDS was at a federal and not a state level.” An honest mistake anyone could have made!
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