Lee, Barone: PaLINation -- why sports is better than politics Daily Events HumanEventsDaily@email.humanevents.com |
| 12:56 PM (55 minutes ago) | | | |
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| Mondays with Tony Lee | 02.13.12 |  |
This weekend, we saw Palin-palooza in Washington, D.C. when Sarah Palin spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and #Linsanity across the nation when Jeremy Lin, on the grandest basketball stage, scored 38 points against the Los Angeles nation and got the sports world in a buzz.
Though Palin showed this weekend that she could generate the enthusiasm the other presidential candidates could not and proved again that nobody captures the heart of Republicans more than she does, there was chatter among some in the GOP establishment -- even those who saw the speech and the crowd reaction with their own eyes -- that Palin did not do any better or any worse than the other candidates.
This is demonstrably false.
Such silly-talk would be the equivalent of sportswriters writing that Lin performed poorly last week in New York and the Knicks won despite his poor performance.
The difference between sports and politics is that nobody in sports can write such nonsense because everyone watches the same game. And if someone did write such nonsense, they would be resoundingly mocked and run out of the profession -- that is in and of itself enough of a deterrent to keep sportswriters honest
Furthermore, sportswriters can hate or love teams or players but they still have to objectively write about what happened on the field of play. Again, because everyone is watching the same game.
But in politics, the chattering class and many of those who write about it have the gall to try to convince people that “x” happened when “y” occurred.
In a more interconnected world -- made more possible by the proliferation of social media -- this will be harder to do.
I wish politics had a deterrent or check similar to that in sports, in which writers and commentators would not dare to pen something that went against what everyone saw.
In any event, one thing was clear this weekend: PaLINation (yes, I did that) was out in full force, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not being honest.
—Tony Lee |
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 | | February 13, 1990
German reunification
On this day in 1990, Germany was reunified after nearly half a century of division between West Germany and communist East Germany, which had been controlled by the Soviet Union. The reunification occurred less than a year after the Berlin wall was torn down. |
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