THAT’S NOT AN ESPECIALLY IMPRESSIVE SKILL IN A PRESIDENT…. Before last night’s World Series game, former Presidents Bush took the mound for a ceremonial pitch, thrown, not surprisingly, by the younger one. It was in Texas, and Bush 43 used to own one of the teams in the game, so the Bushes were well received.
But Scott Lemieux notes that the reaction to the pitch from some on the right is rather odd.
ShorterVerbatim Blogprof: “How refreshing that we had a President that knows how to throw a baseball. Bush didn’t ‘wrist’ it like sissy girls do.” How dreamy! Sadly, this is followed by links to several other wingers making similar observations, perhaps while scrawling hearts all over their kiddie biographies.
It seems bizarre, but far-right really do seem excited about this today. One prominent conservative wrote about the former president throwing a baseball, “What a moment! … What a wonderful moment.” Another called the joint appearance on the field, “What a moving study in dignity and class. What a great example.” Another writer on the same site wrote, “God, I miss the man. I disagreed with him on a number of issues … but no one ever doubted where his loyalties lay or what country he thought he was President of…. It’s good to see that he still throws a baseball like a man, which is how he governed.”
Another wrote, “Miss them yet, America? What a moment in Texas. Father, son and baseball — it does not get any more American than that…. Remember Barack Hussein Obama’s pathetic first pitches? Who could forget the lameness.”
Remember, these people are entirely serious. None of this is tongue-in-cheek, or intended to be funny, or published as some kind of parody.
There was a point about two years ago at which conservatives started pretending Bush really wasn’t one of them. He expanded the size and scope of government; he added $5 trillion to the debt in just eight years; and his administration was fraught with corruption, incompetence, and mismanagement. As Bush departed from the stage, and historians characterized him as one of the worst presidents in American history, leading far-right voices generally pretended Bush had no business characterizing himself as a “conservative.”
Two years later, the man who couldn’t govern can throw a baseball, and that’s apparently enough to send Lowry-style starbursts across the television screens of far-right activists everywhere.
