“In accepting war, it should be ‘pure and simple’ as applied to the belligerents. I would keep it so, till all traces of the war are effaced; till those who appealed to it are sick and tired of it, and come to the emblem of our nation, and sue for peace. I would not coax them, or even meet them half-way, but make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.”
— Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
We had a notion of what to expect from the heretofore untested commissioner of the National Basketball Association when he took his place behind a podium Tuesday. Punishment, yes — but how much, no. Adam Silver is new at his job, and from the get-go his league was subjected to ignominy brought about by a man who somehow had survived decades of evidence that he was an unabashed racist. The recorded and leaked comments of Donald Sterling, which instructed his one-time girlfriend to not bring black people to home games, to not include them on her “lousy f—ing Instagrams,” to do almost anything but “broadcast” her association with blacks, certainly confirmed it, the way plunging into a pool verifies that the water is wet.
Silver, in unwavering and stern tone, eviscerated deprived Sterling of $2.5 million of his immense fortune, banned him for life from the league, and began the compulsory process by which his team will be purchased from him.
For this, Adam Silver
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http://www.archive.org/stream/abrahamlincolngr00jenn/abrahamlincolngr00jenn_djvu.txt
http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/madison-the-debates-on-the-adoption-of-the-federal-constitution-vol-5#chapter_112488
