Debbie Young
Baseball season is off to a fine start, and Boston Red Sox fans are pretty pumped up. I was told v. early this morning that Boston, at this point in the season, has won more games than in the team’s history (at this time of year). Might be.
With such a promising start, why in June are we hearing about football and another national-anthem kerfuffle between the President and the football team that beat Tom Brady and the Pats in Super Bowl LII?
In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger, along with a member of our household, claims not to care anymore about the NFL. Really. DH too is from Cleveland, which doesn’t help.
Headline news this past week has focused on the Trump White House “disinviting” the whole Eagles football team as retaliation to some players threatening to not show. As Mr. Henninger notes in “Wonderland”:
LeBron James took time off Tuesday from preparing for Cleveland’s NBA final against Golden State to say that neither basketball team would go to the White House because “no one wants the invite anyways.”
Amen. Let’s end right now the ridiculous habit of inviting the sports world’s plutocrats to the White House.
The press says Mr. Trump is pushing the battle of the national anthem because it plays to his base. I suppose it does. But here’s what galls even non-Trumpians about this kneeling kerfuffle: We live in a world soaking in partisan politics. Then one day you wake up ready to relax with NFL Sunday, and you discover that “The Star-Spangled Banner” has become totally politicized. Any normal person, including liberals who won’t admit it, would have a three-word reaction to this spectacle, and the first two words begin with “w” and “t.”
President Trump is a showman, “who has been playing the media like a Stradivarius his whole life,” continues DH.
The sophisticates in the media thought they could beat Donald Trump at this game by burying him under waves of negative publicity. But he feeds off of it, just as he turned the Philadelphia Eagles’ White House no-show into a display of patriotic music, with the maestro at the center.
Read more here.
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