Who Is Bin Laden Rooting For in the World Series?
As the Red Sox close in on their first title since Babe Ruth could see his own feet without the help of a mirror and a B girl, this post's titular question is the only thing keeping me awake. Indeed, Scott Stapp's seventh-inning-stretch rendition of "God Bless America" made me wish Al Qaeda had dropped a Kate Smith effigy on the former Creed frontman.
I'm just amazed that either Sean Hannity and/or Al Franken and/or all the drips at sea haven't somehow implied that Bin Laden is rooting their opponent's team to win.
The closest I've seen was an invocation of the American League Championship Series by James "Wooly" Wolcott, the author of Attack Poodles and other Media Mutants who never misses an opportunity to invoke a gal's physical shortcomings despite his own blobular resemblance to that great specimen of homo superior, Fred J. Dukes.
Waxed Wooly on those brave men in grey and black, the nearly nameless and faceless umpires who keep us all honest:
Twice, the umpires set aside their professional egos, practiced true collegiality, erased a mistake, and did the right thing, risking the wrath of Yankee fans. Think how rare that's been in the Bush-Cheney years, admitting error and correcting it–taking the right stand after making the wrong stand. Last night the umps reminded me of a better America I'd almost forgotten we'd had, one where reason every once in a while prevails.
By yoking baseball to a banal political point that surely induces cringes even among friends, Wooly joins the ranks of Peggy Noonan, the certifiably insane Reagan-Bush Cyrano who mistook the last Subway Series for a morality play between good and evil and, even less credibly, between supposedly Republican Mets and Democratic Yankees. And, of course, Wooly walks a rhetorical basepath blazed by Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who, even while awaiting death, famously found time to natter on about the oh-so-proletarian Dodgers.
Here's looking forward to football, a game that has never been mistaken for anything other than the celebration of lunk-headed violence it is. Except, of course, all the time by people like Michael Novak, whose reaction to the last Super Bowl halftime show was nothing short of an Onion parody.