why michael barrett might win busblog man of the year

today the cubs faced the white sox in the south side of chicago.

and the cubs won.

i know the scoreboard had some numbers on it that made it look like the white sox came out on top but they didnt. they got a beat down.

a lot of baseball fans are happy about interleague play – american league teams playing national league clubs during the regular season – but i hate it. i hate it because it’s fake and unnatural and sends the wrong message to the children. i dont want the cubs playing the sox or the mets playing the yankees unless it’s in the world series, when it means something.

but baseball’s marketing department threw the red ants on the black ants during the regular season to increase attendance, and theyve gotten their wish. interleague play is a wild success. however so is pornography and violent films.

today the chicago cubs, who havent been winning many games ever since their star first baseman broke his wrist, went to the south side to play the white sox who have been playing well since last year.

some say the white sox are the defending world series champions but since i didnt see it with my own eyes im choosing to believe that last year was a very bad dream involving holograms.

in the second inning the white sox catcher rounded third and there was a play at the plate. the white sox fella ran into the cubs catcher, michael barrett and knocked him down before he had a chance to tag him out.

he then slapped home plate with excitement as the home team cheered.

then he lowered his shoulder and ran into the cubs catcher barrett in order to retrieve his batting helmet and barrett did what every cub fan has been wanting to do to the white sox for a very long time,

he punched him in the fucking jaw

and instantly became a hero and a legend in the deep, long history of the north side club.

the sox catcher later in an interview said he didnt know why barrett hit him but that just goes to show you how the white sox are – theyre dirty liars who deserve to be beaten tomorrow when the two teams meet up again.

its a good thing i dont have a pregnant wife right now because i would name the child michael barrett pierce regardless of what sex the infant ended being.

tonight i will sleep well. i will kiss a teenage girl and she will kiss me back and ask me how my day was and i will tell her the story of michael barrett. sadly she doesnt understand sports because shes european (she even insists that soccer is a sport) but i will try to explain to her that the white sox are like a younger brother. one who you have to share a house with because of blood and laws and history. but you dont want to share the house with them. youre supposed to love them but you dont. and you never will. and even if they move away you still wont love them.

she wont understand this because she knows that i have two younger siblings who i love very much and at that point i will tell her that i have a very dark heart full of contradictions, but one thing is crystal clear – the white sox are the enemy. more so than the cardinals or the yankees or even our current administration who lies and tortures and raises our gas prices. the white sox are worse.

yes they gave us bill veeck and harry caray and jimmy piersal and that midget and some of my best friends are sox fans (actually none of them are) and i even have a soft spot for jerry manuel and scott podsednick but the white sox are the shit stain in the toilet that just wont scrub off. i hope their stadium burns, i hope they lose the rest of their games this season, and i hope whatever happened last year gets expunged from the record due to some scandal that we stumble across in the near future.

until then michael barrett is my hero and i will buy his jersey in the morning. the first cub jersey ive ever owned.

cubs win.

video of the blow + a sox fans biased version of the incident

this saturday i will turn the busblog over

to ms maureen dowd (id hit it) who in turn turned her column over to the graduates of the New School who took ownership of their graduation at madison square garden while a certain republican sell out from arizona took to the mic

Maureen Dowd
New York Times 5/20/06

“Make Poetry, Not War”

It was a rough crowd for agents of American imperialism.

At the New School commencement at Madison Square Garden’s theater yesterday afternoon, dozens of the red-and-black-gowned graduates and some faculty were heckling, cackling, hissing, booing, jeering, whooping, bolting, turning their backs and holding up orange signs that read, “Our commencement is not your platform.” As for John McCain, he spoke about how the “passion for self-expression sometimes overwhelms our civility.”

“We’re graduating, not voting,” one young man yelled.

“This is all about you,” another called out. “We don’t care.”

A little while after the senator quoted Yeats about the fleeting nature of beauty, a student sarcastically called out, “More poetry.”

First, Mr. McCain and the New School’s president, Bob Kerrey, were slapped around by a student speaker, Jean Sara Rohe, a 21-year-old from Nutley, N.J., who sang a lyric from a peace song and then abandoned her original remarks to talk about the “outrage” over Mr. McCain’s speaking gig.

“The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded,” Ms. Rohe said, adding: “I am young, and although I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous and wrong.”

She continued: “And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction.”

The New School, of course, makes New York University seem like Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., where Mr. McCain kowtowed last weekend to Jerry Falwell, the looney-toon he formerly deemed an agent of intolerance. (Just as Rudy buddy-buddied with Ralph Reed in Atlanta.)

The ultraliberal kids at the New School, the pacifist Greenwich Village university, think of themselves as free-thinking rabble-rousers in a world where many college kids, complacently cocooned under iPods, don’t even like to debate, much less protest.

When a rigid-faced Mr. Kerrey chided the audience for being rude, a young woman yelled out, “You’re a war criminal!” And a guy chimed in, “Yes, you are!”

It was a remarkable tableau to see the two iconoclastic vets, their bodies beneath the black gowns still bearing broken pieces from Vietnam, being pilloried by kids angry about another endless war, faceless enemy and feckless defense secretary.

Senator McCain came to Mr. Kerrey’s defense in 2001. That’s when graduate students called for the New School president to resign and for Congress to investigate him because a Times magazine piece had revealed that he had led a Seals unit that killed up to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children.

(The Pentagon is now investigating a case in Haditha, Iraq, where marines are accused of killing 15 unarmed Iraqis from two families, including 7 women and 3 children.)

Yesterday, Mr. Kerrey returned the favor, admonishing the students that when they are “heckling from an audience … no bravery is required.”

The Arizona senator did not depart from his text and engage the students, as Bill Clinton might have done, with a passionate exegesis of his stance. And, still trying to show his temper is under control, he did not push back, as Rudy Giuliani might have.

He may have even found the screaming students useful, as a liberal hippie foil that will endear him to the evangelical base he’s smooching up. Mr. McCain’s adviser, John Weaver, talked dismissively of the West Village students, saying they should get out more and hear opposing viewpoints.

Mr. McCain’s panderthon grew even more absurd this week. He let the Wyly brothers — the Texas businessmen who financed a $2.5 million ad campaign in 2000 trashing his environmental record, a move that enraged Mr. McCain and spurred him to call the Wylys W.’s “sleazy Texas buddies” — hold a fund-raiser for him in Dallas.

The senator may have wanted to give the same commencement speech at Liberty, the New School and Columbia as a way of showing those disillusioned by his snuggling with old enemies that he is still a straight-talker, willing to say the same thing to Southern conservatives and Northern liberals.

But Bob Kerrey better summed up the feeling of many of us about the New McCain in the new issue of Men’s Vogue. He mocked the senator’s coziness with W., telling Ned Martel: “He kissed him! McCain let Bush’s lips touch him. Yuck!”

bonds hits 714 + SIRI hits 4 + jessica hits brasil + whatshername hits 28