Mark McGwire, America’s tarnished baseball hero, the mythical Paul Bunyan with a bat, the man who went in front of a bunch of showboating, preening congressmen and infamously said that he wasn’t there to talk about the past, finally opened up last week  and talked about the past, about steroid use and about breaking the hallowed single season home run record while juiced to the hilt.

And the reaction, outside of the expected cacophony of sports press making the same arguments in an insular world, caused such uproar that you could hear a mouse whisper.

As McGwire begins to earn back some respect for finally coming around to publicly admitting what everyone who has followed baseball for the past decade already knew, the credit goes to Ari Fleischer, the man behind the curtain pulling the strings on McGwire’s announcement.

This time, Fleischer’s plan worked. (more…)

H4Y7XVAZ5KPJAs all sentient readers (and innumerable ex-readers) of The New York Times know, but executive editor Bill Keller seemingly does not, among the things that make the paper so relentlessly irritating is that its left/liberal assumptions are pervasive and inescapable. As my first Diary entry noted, even turning to the food or fashion section one can never be sure of finding refuge from a gratuitous, nasty aside about Sarah Palin, or a bit of offhand rah-rahing for Obamacare, or the conviction that those twin monsters, diversity and multiculturalism, are unquestioned goods.

The sports section is, of course, especially egregious in pushing the paper’s social agenda, enthusiastically embracing the victim mentality in its every twisted guise on the court or diamond or gridiron. Most memorably, there was former Executive Editor Howell Raines’s feminist-inspired jihad against Augusta National and, even more notoriously, the paper’s shameless crusade against the Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of rape. (more…)