"Ty Cobb was exactly like Donald Trump. So was Babe Ruth. "
Aside from having a better batting average lifetime, Ty Cobb was probably a lot more divisive than
even The Donald could ever be. I don't remember anyone trying to rig the deck against The
Donald the way the St. Louis Browns tried against Cobb in 1910, playing their infield back during
a doubleheader in order to let Cleveland's Nap Lajoie beat Cobb out for the Chalmers Award---given
at the time to each league's batting champion, with the prize being a Chalmers car. And, say what you
will about some of his more dubious endorsements, I don't think The Donald himself is any kind
of racist, even if his rejoinders to those endorsements have been somewhat clumsy.
And, other than hitting about eighty times fewer home runs than the Babe, I'm hard pressed to
remember any time The Donald was caught consorting with hookers in his hotel (The Donald is
no marital paragon but I don't think even he went
that far), hanging his manager out over the
rear end of a moving train to protest a disciplinary fine (yes, you can look it up: The Donald played
baseball in his school days), or being told practically point blank that since he could barely take
care of or control himself nobody was going to trust him to manage a team of major leaguers. (That,
folks, is the real reason Babe Ruth never got to realise his one ambition for when his playing career
might end.) Not to mention, I don't think The Donald ever got himself run out of town on a rail by
way of a to-be-controversial trade because he was impervious to team discipline. (
That, folks, was
why cash-strapped Red Sox owner Harry Frazee was willing to trade Ruth to the Yankees in the first
place.)
(Remember the foregoing, folks, because I'm not exactly one of The Donald's biggest fans.)
The TRUTH is you may not have as many or as
wide ranging choices as you would like. In REALITY we often must choose between choices not of our
own making.
How we got to the current choices not of our own making isn't rocket science:
* George W. Bush and the Republican Congress he managed to have for a good while absolutely
cratered into a morass of metastasising an ignorant big government even further, so much so
that they blew it into a Democratic Congress. (Is it me, or does the Republican Party really have
a genius for self-destruction?)
* His Excellency Al-Hashish Field Marshamallow Dr. Barack Obama Dada, COD, RIP, LSMFT,
Would-Be Life President of the Republic Formerly Known as the United States and his gang
of Democrats making Bush and the former Republican Congress look like constitutionalist
pikers by comparison.
Unfortunately, in my state, the only alternative choice offered in a general election is "None of
the Above," Nevada having done away with the write-in vote some years back. Shame, too.
I'm denied my right to vote along Artemus Ward's dictum that if we can't find a live man or
woman who amounts to anything, by all means let us have a first class corpse. (If I had
the write-in right in Nevada, along the Ward line I'd have voted for the man who observed,
"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and misapplying the
wrong solutions"---Groucho Marx. That shows more political wisdom than anything coming
from the mouths of any of the current candidates.) What the hell, if the dead can vote in
Chicago, the living can vote for the dead. And the dead would wreak a helluva lot less mischief than
the living candidates of either major party stand to do if and when elected.
