The Salvation Army, the Baptist Young People’s Union, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Luther League (Missouri Synod) have approved this essay only on the ground that I disclose that it is a political and not a baseball essay. But to make my point it is necessary to call on the practice of baseball as an analogy.
Until the mid 1950s, major league baseball regularly played double headers on Sunday afternoons. Before long, greed overtook the owners and that practice was largely stopped. Today, we find that double headers are rarely played and, if they are, two admissions are charged. Formerly when double headers occurred on the schedule, they were played with a half-hour intermission between the two games and the spectator could enjoy seeing two games for the price of one. Now, however, if there is a double header, the owners charge for an afternoon game and a second charge will be required for the evening game with a three- or four-hour intermission between the games.
Now let us say that a player is having a bad day and let us say that he is indeed playing a double header. In the first game, this unfortunate player will strike out five times. In the second game, he will foul out twice and be called out on strikes in his final time at bat. So for the day he will not have any hits in ten trips to the plate. In baseball terms, every commentator will tell you that he went “0-fer ten”. In proper English, the middle word “fer” is a corruption of the connecting phrase “for,” but it has been pronounced this way since Abner Doubleday invented the game.
It is most likely that a player who is having such a bad day a bat, will then have a terrible day in the field because he is thinking about his batting performance. A ball will go over his head and another ball will go through his legs. On another play he will throw to the wrong base and in another case he will overthrow the infielder. So you see, an “0-fer” is a terrible disease to acquire.
In the last few weeks, the Bush administration in Washington has gone 0-fer ten or 0-fer fifty, if a proper account is maintained. Here are three examples in which the administration was either struck out, called out or, if they were lucky, fouled the third strike into the catcher’s glove.
In the first instance, we have been told over the past year, primarily by our intellectual President, that Iran is a terrible threat to all of us. They have been developing, as he says, “nucular” weapons and fully intend to drop those “nucular” weapons right in the middle of Times Square. Now only two weeks ago, our lovable President informed us that we were flirting with World War III. All of this was done of course to persuade the American public to back a military operation against Iran. The modus operandi was remarkably similar to what had been employed when the Bush administration invaded Iraq. So you see, World War III was right on the horizon.
But then last week there came a National Intelligence Estimate, called an NIE, compiled by the 16 agencies in the United States government that are in charge of spying. Unanimously, the 16 agencies concluded that in 2003 – four years ago – Iran had stopped its nuclear program. In short, for more than four years Iran posed no nuclear threat to the United States or to anyone else. The indisputable fact is that they had stopped working on a weapons program that could threaten us, Israel, of any of the neighboring countries. When the NIE came to light last week, the first week of December, the wind went out of the sails of the Bush administration. All of the business about preparing for the Third World War became hollow. There was no Third World War, nor was there a “nucular” threat from Iran. So in effect after four years when the Bush administration should have known that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapons project, we were belatedly informed – not by the Bush administration but by the NIE – that Iran was not “the axis of evil” as they had been portrayed by Bush himself. There was no World War III on the horizon. In effect, George Bush, Richard Cheney, and the rest of the neo-conservatives had whiffed at the plate. Clearly, they had missed every pitch by a mile. And so every American is entitled to say that in the case of the non-nuclear threat from Iran, Mr. Bush was 0-fer for three or four seasons, and should be released outright.
Then we have the case of the missing tapes of torture. For years, the Bush administration, particularly the president himself, has insisted that we do not torture anybody. In spite of all of the evidence to the contrary, the Bush people insist that waterboarding is not torture. Waterboarding induces a sense of drowning. A person with a heart condition could die before his torturers could stop the procedure. Ahhh, but Mr. Bush contends that this is not torture. If this is not torture, this old soldier must ask just what in the hell is it? Answering my own question, I say it is torture, pure and simple.
Bush’s nominee to succeed the late Alberto Gonzales as the Attorney General of the United States, Mr. Mukasey, twisted himself into knots before the Senate Judiciary Committee, trying to say anything but that waterboarding was torture. He did this for obvious reasons. The New York Times disclosed on December 18th that his predecessor, Gonzales, as well as David Arrington, Mr. Cheney’s Chief of Staff, among others, were aware of the destruction of the tapes and did nothing to stop it. Arrington has the job that Scutter Libby used to call his own. Mukasey knew that in the long run, there will be serious charges that waterboarding is indeed torture and that the people who conducted that exercise may well find themselves in jail.
Nonetheless, the tapes of the torture of those two or three prisoners have been destroyed and now investigations are underway by the Congress and by a joint CIA-Department of Justice probe. What this case calls for is an independent prosecutor. Can anyone expect that the CIA will investigate these charges honestly when they were the people who applied the torture and then destroyed the tapes? The answer is that this story is rigged. The fact is that the United States does torture its prisoners, which is a barbaric custom. It guarantees that our military personnel, when they are taken, will be treated exactly in that same way.
So we see the baseball analogy still applies in that, in the destruction of the tapes of the torture sessions, we have another instance of the administration striking out. In this case they did not even manage to foul off the ball. They simply were called out on strikes. So that’s two strikes.
Now finally we have had a speech by Mitt Romney, a presidential contender from the Republican Party. Mr. Romney is a Mormon and he was billed as having planned to make a speech explaining his Mormon faith. The fact is, he did none of that. He did not explain, for example, how the angel Moroni impregnated Mary, the mother of Jesus. Nor did he explain why the angel Moroni told Joseph Smith that in his back yard near Palmyra, New York, he would find golden plates that Mr. Smith, with the help of heaven-sent spectacles, would translate into the Book of Mormon. When Mr. Romney spoke, the rest of us were hoping to hear how in the world any sane man could believe in bizarre garbage such as this. Ahhh, but there was none of that. Instead, Mr. Romney spoke for about 20 minutes and the burden of the speech was as follows: “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom.” Most commentators, or nearly all of the commentators, on the evening news were as baffled as I was by Mr. Romney’s non-witty epigram. My freedom requires no religion at all. The women of Saudi Arabia under the Wahhabi influence in that nation enjoy all kinds of religion but they are not free to drive or even to leave the house without the permission of a man. Basically the widely hailed speech by Mitt Romney was a dud. Anyone who votes for Romney will be on his own to discern how the Angel Moroni impregnated Mary, the mother of Jesus. So here is another strikeout. In this case, the batter was simply called out on strikes before he left the dugout.
In the great game of baseball, three strikes and you’re out. Well, three people have taken three strikes and so the side is retired. And so as your life progresses, I hope that World War III does not happen to you, nor do I wish that you should ever be non-tortured, as the Bush administration says, and I hope that in the end, you will be able to figure out what in the world Mr. Romney’s non-witty epigram was all about. Perhaps, dear readers, only the Angel Moroni could explain all of this. I want to be first in line to hear what he has to say.
E. E. CARR
December 9, 2007
Essay 276
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Kevin’s commentary: When you’re young and just learning to write, teachers often have a go-to form for essay writing. They say you should start with an introduction, move to three body paragraphs, and then conclude the body paragraphs in a way that references the introduction. It clearly is a writing style that is not fit for every scenario, but it is nice to see that it suits this essay so well.
The essay had predictive power, too. It held that someone who has a terrible time at bat will go on to produce a bad showing in the field later that game. After being elected twice — a double header, certainly — the administration followed up with poor performance clear to the bitter end.