D.C. Droppings - XII

Another Reason to Hate the Yankees

But first, a bulletin from your nation’s capital: The Washington Nationals finally won a game.

Unfortunately, they did it while wearing the most disgusting uniform since the San Diego Padres showed up one Sunday last year in camouflage pants and jerseys. The Nats on Thursda wore a jersey and cap emblazoned with the stars and stripes woven into their logo.

The military-corporate fascism that infects the rest of the country has now invaded the baseball fields.

Every day at Nationals Park, the scoreboard shows wounded veterans who are guests of the club, which is great because there is almost no one else attending these games. But if you want to do something nice for legless, armless young men who are not on the Nationals roster, do it. But why announce it every day?

The reason: Major League Baseball owners are of one with their former colleague George W. Bushitler. They let no opportunity go by to require baseball fans to stand, wave, salute, cheer and ultimately sing their praises of war – starting with the prescribed “Star Spangled Banner” and ending in the 7^th inning with “God Bless America.”

Which brings me to the title of this posting. A man has filed suit against the New York Yankees, the very emblem of corrupt capitalism, the very team name that symbolizes America-hating in the rest of the world.

He is charging that his civil rights, if not his bladder, were violated when Yankee Stadium personnel refused to let him go to the bathroom during the playing of “God Bless America,” the God damndest piece of treacle ever written. According to news reports, it wasn’t a superpatriot from the Bronx taking advantage of an usher’s uniform: it was said to be Stadium policy that no one leaves his or her seat during the Nuremberg Rally masquerading as a 7^th-inning stretch.

I have talked about this before, and I thought voting for Obama would change the culture a little bit. But no such luck. The militarism is back bigger than ever – masters of war whipping up gullible fans and, worse, keeping them from urinating. Usually, when I am about to be assaulted by the American version of “Deutschland Uber Alles” and don’t feel like making a stand by refusing to stand, I slip out and pee. This year at Nationals Park, they pipe the abhorrent anthem into the bathrooms!

Obaminable

Speaking of Obama, he has gone off his effing nut by announcing there will be no prosecutorial investigation of the CIA agents who engaged in torture that is against international law and would result in their immediate arrest in most nations of the world. If I were president, I don’t know that I would make it a big deal either way, but I certainly would not preempt the historical necessity of creating a sworn record of what Bushitler’s Boys did in the name of my country.

I cannot fathom Obama’s action, because whatever political, national security or compassionate reason there may be for not imprisoning these traitorous thugs, he has, in effect, said, “They were only following orders.”

Joe the Scar

Until this week, I enjoyed watching “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC early a.m. talk show starring ex-Congressman Joe Scarborough, with news anchor Mika Brzezinski, smartaleck Willie Geist and the factually deficient fired newspaper columnist Mike Barnicle who likes to speak for the little guy but winds up drooling in slavish slobber to the host and every guest. He should slobber because he is the most useless appendage to the practice of journalism since Bernard Goldberg crawled out from under the Fox rock

Scarborough (who declined to run for re-election some years ago after a dead woman was found in his district office) is a conservative Republican, and until this week, he offered an intelligent, witty and friendly menu of ideas I don’t subscribe, but enjoy, listening to.

A few days ago, however, someone handed him a talking point and his true colors of super-patriotic jingoism emerged.

He said that a private memo drafted for the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security -- which expressed concern that service members returning from war could become ripe for recruiting by neo-Nazi and other hate groups when they find no jobs, no mortgages and a black president -- was actually a nefarious administration plot to “target” the military.

The memo implied no such thing. In fact, it was concerned with the young, low-paid, violent, head-shaved members of the military we are supposed to be saluting at baseball games becoming targets themselves.

And even at its worst reading, the fact remains that veterans are a disproportionate number of the incarcerated, are more prone to domestic violence than nonveterans, and numbered among them Lee Harvey Oswald and Timothy McVeigh. Veterans are also a disproportionate number of federal civilian employees because the federal government’s original affirmative action program gives veterans a substantial advantage over more qualified applicants.

Sure, an overwhelming majority of veterans are as upstanding as the rest of society’s dregs and geniuses, but if you were looking for suggestible, sociopathic violent young men, you would – just as major city police departments do – “target” the military.

Scarborough today also repeated the foul canard that Vietnam veterans returning home from the war were spat upon. It is a lie. How do I know this? I was involved in journalism at the time with access to every wire and every newspaper in the country. There was not a single contemporaneous news article reporting such actions and no police report has ever been filed about one. I also was fairly familiar with the ideology and personalities of anti-war activists.

Knowing what we know about journalism and human nature, it is beyond belief -- except for warmongering nitwits -- that a soldier could have been spat upon in public without anyone either assaulting the spitter, telling a newspaper or telling law enforcement officials who, even back then, were plentiful in airports and train stations.

I repeat: There is no record of any veteran being spat upon in public, and I offer a $1,000 donation to the charity of choice of anyone who can come up with contemporaneous documentation of such an incident -- not "my uncle's brother-in-law's cousin's friend heard about it."