Deflategate

A Matter of Priorities

President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama pose with the Jackie Robinson West All Stars Little Baseball League in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., Nov. 6, 2014. (YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images)

It is, of course, a tragically stupid tale:

Little League Baseball has stripped the U.S. championship from Chicago-based Jackie Robinson West and suspended its coach for violating a rule prohibiting the use of players who live outside the geographic area that the team represents, it was announced Wednesday.

Jackie Robinson West must vacate wins from the 2014 Little League Baseball International Tournament — including its Great Lakes Regional and United States championships.

The team’s manager, Darold Butler, has been suspended from Little League activity, and Illinois District 4 administrator Michael Kelly has been removed from his position.

The organization found that Jackie Robinson West used a falsified boundary map and that team officials met with neighboring Little League districts in Illinois to claim players and build what amounts to a superteam.

As a result, the United States championship has been awarded to Mountain Ridge Little League from Las Vegas.

“Quite honestly, we had to do this,” Little League International president and CEO Stephen D. Keener told ESPN on Wednesday. “We had no choice. We had to maintain the integrity of the Little League program. … As painful as this is, it’s a necessary outcome from what we finally have been able to confirm.

“The real troubling part of this is that we feel horribly for the kids who are involved with this. Certainly, no one should cast any blame, any aspersions on the children who participated on this team. To the best of our knowledge, they had no knowledge that they were doing anything wrong. They were just kids out playing baseball, which is the way it should be. They were celebrated for that by many, many organizations, many people. What we’re most concerned about today is that it’s going to be hard on these kids. And that’s the part that breaks your heart.”

(ESPN)

People are, as you might imagine, furious. And they should be. Yet what is it about our society that so many people waste so much energy being furious about the wrong thing?

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What It Comes To (Bibi-Boehner Mix)

Detail of cartoon by Cameron Cardow (Ottowa Citizen) via Cagle Post, 22 January 2015.

Sometimes we pass on a story not simply for basic matters of will―Do I really want to do this now?―but also because we doubt ourselves in the moment. Never mind. A paragraph from Jodi Rudoren of The New York Times:

The invitation to address a joint meeting of Congress to make the case for new sanctions on Iran came from the House speaker, John A. Boehner, a Republican. Mr. Boehner did not consult either the Obama administration or his Democratic counterparts, something several veteran diplomats described as unprecedented. The White House responded with its own snub, announcing that President Obama, who has promised to veto any new sanctions, would not meet with Mr. Netanyahu while he was in town.

And that, in truth, is where we dropped the story last week, mostly not bothering with it because while this is a fascinating chapter in the continuing Republican denigration of the American political system, it really did seem the sort of obscure thing that would have our neighbors wondering where we got this stuff and why we bother with such minutiae.

To borrow from a great American statesmanα: Oops.

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