A little Hullabaloo

Two good posts from Digby yesterday:

• Why on earth is Congress focused on baseball, with all the real issues out there?

  This is America's pastime, not the tobacco industry. It is highly unpleasant to watch a bunch of politicians browbeat famous players and then grill baseball owners as if they are a mafia family --- while we are at war, the treasury is being bankrupted and unprecedented government corruption is happening right before their eyes. Listening to them sanctimoniously lecture baseball about its ethics and practices is just mind boggling.

  It certainly boggles my mind!
  
  
• A recent Iranian case in which a pedophile (I think) was flogged and hung elicited a disturbing level of approval from conservative commentators (and one prominent legal scholar) in this country.

  How long has it been since we were talking about torture for the alleged higher purpose of obtaining information a suspect may or may not have? A couple of months? Yesterday? And now the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment has entered the dialog as well.

  He asks some other good questions -- is this what comes from our increasing attention to the needs of victims? from our comfort with the death penalty (which in the end seems largely to be about revenge)? Certainly hard to argue with this:

  When influential conservative constitutional law professors start giving the Bill of Rights only tepid support then we have to just say no. The Bill of Rights may not be a sacred writ, but it’s the best thing this misbegotten country ever did and it’s the single thing that makes the American system worth a damn.

  There is an increasing feeling of the primal in much current "debate." Kind of makes me want to keep looking over my shoulder...

There's a reason that Digby got a Koufax award for Best Writing in a blog this past year. Always worth catching his latest.