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Good Morning!

It’s 4:40 am. I can’t get to sleep because I’m nauseous and my stomach’s upset, probably because of Fox’s miserable coverage of the baseball All-Star game as if it was a slow day on the boardwalk. At points when the game would normally be suspenseful, the awful Joe Buck was having inane conversations about facial hair and other trivia with players in the field. Such utter disrespect for the sport it was covering in what is supposed to be a showcase!

1. Speaking of the All-Star game...Milwaukee Brewers reliever Josh Hader,  who has been a break-out relief pitching star this season, gave up four hits and a three-run homer, his worst performance of the year, on his biggest stage to date, the All-Star game in Washington, D.C. That was the least of his rotten day, however. Earlier in the evening, some  sleuth dived into Hader’s Twitter history and found some high school tweets with racist, anti-gay and sexist words and sentiments in them. The dirt was slurped up by reporters while the game was going on, and they confronted Hader immediately after the game, which Hader’s team, the National League All-Stars, lost by two runs, or one less than he had given up.

To his credit, Hader didn’t deny that he had written the tweets. “No excuses. I was dumb and stupid,."he said. He was 17-year-old when he published them.

Let’s say that again: he was 17. This shouldn’t be news, and it shouldn’t have been reported. Yet some are speculating that Major League Baseball will fine or otherwise punish Hader, and worse, that they should. If they try, I hope the players’ union makes them sorry. Hader was legally a minor; he hadn’t been drafted by a MLB team yet when those tweets were made, and  MLB didn’t even have a social media policy then. If Hader is punished, it will be one more example of craven organizational misconduct and abuse in response to, or fear of, the speech police and the political correctness mob.

2. Per se negligent homicide. In another situation in which I reject the “he’s been punished enough” defense, six-year-old Makayla S. Bowling  was shot in the head and killed by her father last week when his gun accidentally discharged while he was cleaning it. He didn’t know the gun was loaded. He did know his daughter was within shooting range, however. The authorities won’t prosecute unless they find evidence of foul play, but there is already sufficient evidence of fatal negligence. He should be charged with manslaughter.

3. Plan N! Some Democrats and journalists who have real jobs and don’t live in a padded room really are saying in public that Donald Trump should be impeached for what he said in a press conference in Helsinki. Astounding. Astounding, and unethical, because a lot of Americans—you know, like the ones on Facebook who are passing around a meme showing Obama with the legend “Share if he’s your favorite President!” (Why not just a label that says “I have never read an American history book”?)—are so ignorant about law, politics, diplomacy, and just about everything else, that they can be convinced by ravings.

If you are keeping track, and it is hard, be sure to add Plan N (Calling comments at a press conference treason) to the list of “resistance” impeachment and removal plots. Oh, heck, I need to update the list anyway:

The Impeachment And Coup Plans, Updated.

Plan A: Reverse the election by hijacking the Electoral College.[Status: FAILED and DEAD, until it rises again in 2020]

Plan B: Pre-emptive impeachment.  [Status: FAILED and DEAD]

Plan C : The Emoluments Clause. [Status: Resurrected! ]

Plan D: “Collusion with Russia." [Status: Still twitching]

Plan E : ."Trump is mentally ill so this should trigger the 25th Amendment.." [Status:Ridiculous, but it will be back.]

Plan F: The Maxine Waters Plan, which  is to just impeach the President as soon as Democrats control both Houses, because they can. [Status: Hope springs eternal!]

Plan G : “The President obstructed justice by firing incompetent subordinates, and that’s impeachable.." [Status: LAME, but ONGOING]

Plan H: “Tweeting stupid stuff is impeachable." [Status: ONGOING]

Plan I:  “Let’s relentlessly harass him and insult him and obstruct his efforts to do his job so he snaps and does something really impeachable.." [Status: ONGOING]

Plan J : Force Trump’s resignation based on alleged sexual misconduct that predated his candidacy. .[Status: FAILED and DEAD]

Plan K: Election law violations in pay-offs of old sex-partners [Status: ONGOING]

Plan L: The perjury trap: get Trump to testify under oath, then prove something he said was a lie. [Status: To be determined.]

Plan M: Guilt by association. Prove close associates or family members violated laws. [Status: Ongoing.]

Plan N: Claim that Trump’s comments at his press conference with Putin were “treasonous.”

I could, and probably should, write a lot more about the latest freakout, which now supersedes the freakout of last week, which was that a completely standard-issue, qualified conservative judge was poised to turn the United States into a dystopian dictatorship if he was confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court. What was the Hysteria-of-the-Week  before the Kavanaugh appointment? I can’t even remember. Oh, right: “putting children in cages.”

Each one of these is proclaimed with increasingly hyperbolic and apocalyptic rhetoric and with escalating urgency unmoored to proportion or reality. (Politico: “Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor.") How will “the resistance” react to the third or fourth freakouts in the queue, for we now they are coming? I picture them howling,  falling on all fours and running amuck, biting pedestrians, while MSNBC, the Times editorial board, George Will, Charles Blow, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi call for an armed uprising and the guillotine.

I wish I were kidding.

4.  Back to Josh Hader...After I wrote item #1, I once again tried to get some sleep. I kind of succeeded, and then awoke to NBC Sports baseball blogger, former lawyer Craig Calcaterra, who I swear was once even as rational as you or I,  arguing that the pitcher had an obligation to “apologize and make amends … to explain and atone … to tell us how — apart from getting caught being obnoxious — he became a different person and what that really means.”

This is the world view that the American Left is increasingly embracing, and it ought to scare the hell out of everyone.  Once someone like Hader is under suspicion of thinking non-conforming thoughts—based on his tweets when he was 17!—he must be brought to heel, and prove that he is only capable of Good Think as an adult, or suffer the dire consequences. This kind totalitarian attitude is now infesting our sports reporting. As with the social justice bullying that I recently wrote about here and here,  those who are subjected to such civil rights-strangling pressure have a societal obligation to be strong, courageous, not to roll over, and to fight. I know this is difficult for celebrities, performers and athletes like Hader, who have a lot to lose, but nonetheless, this is one of their most important responsibilities to society as role models. If they don’t fight these efforts to dominate them and dictate conformity in speech and belief, then they have joined the forces of censorship and oppression.

Unfortunately, the ignorant, confused and ethically-muddled dominate these matters. I just heard two of the usual ex-ballplayer/sportswriter teams that make the Sirius MLB channel scream-inducing talk about the Hader situation, and they agreed that if MLB doesn’t DO something to punish Hader, “it will be like they are condoning his tweets.” Well, heck, let’s examine every word, joke, social media post and conversation every athlete and public figure engaged in when they were teenagers, no matter how many years or decades ago it make have been, judge them by today’s hyper-censorious standards, pretend they were members of the professions they now are when they engaged in such taboo utterances, and denounce, shame and shun them, because otherwise we’ll be symbolically endorsing their juvenile slurs!

These two dolts also echoed one of Calcaterra’s more dishonest and unfair arguments, that the fact that Hader didn’t delete those old tweets shows that he probably still feels the same way. We have seen Harvard scholars, lawyers, Presidents, journalists, CEOs and others fall into career-wrecking social media gaffes, but because a twenty-something baseball pitcher didn’t think to erase tweets he made in high school, it proves that he is a racist. This is the level of fairness and thought NBC accepts from its law degree-holding baseball blogger.

I just know I am going to be writing more about the persecution of Josh Hader, so I’ll stop for now. I will say to any athlete, performer, or other public figure who wants to do their duty and fight the Left Wing Conformity mob, I am ready to help you make the case why your attackers are not only wrong but a menace to democracy, and will do so pro bono.