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Tuesday, April 15, 2003

There's no freedom in baseball!!

I don't like baseball. I've never seen Bull Durham.

And yet, even so, somehow this manages to piss me off.

The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY was scheduled to host a performance of "Bull Durham" celebrating that movie's 15th anniversary. On Friday, the president of the Hall, Dale Petroskey, cancelled the event due to anti-war statements made by Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon, stars of the film.

In a press release, Petroskey said that the statements made by Robbins and Sarandon criticizing the Bush Administration "ultimately could put our troops in even more danger."

Aaaaaaaaghhh.

In the first place, Dale Petroskey, you're wrong. Protests against the war do not, in any way, make the war more dangerous for our troops. American anti-war protests do NOT give "aid and comfort" to the enemy, making the fight for Iraq more deadly for our servicemen and women. The proof is in the pudding -- American troops have had a fairly easy march to Baghdad and beyond, even while protests continued at home and in Europe.

In the second place, Dale Petroskey, who in the hell are you to bring politics into sports, and into a showing of a stupid sports-related movie??? It's just baseball, and a baseball movie.

This is just one example of a frightening trend in this country. Our men in women in uniform are fighting, sometimes dying, in Iraq, to give the Iraqi people a taste of freedom that has been denied to them for much too long.

Ironically then, there is a groundswell in this country to take away our freedom of speech in America. While our society has not stooped to Saddam's methods of shooting dissenters in the head, our efforts are nearly as effective. People who dare criticize the war, or the government, are called "unpatriotic," and are accused of supporting the enemy, of making the war more difficult for our troops over there.

Anti-war protestors are accused of "hating America," of hating our military, of wanting us to fail, of being anti-Western, anti-Christian, pro-terrorist traitors.

This is a pile of crap.

The beauty of our American system of government is that it allows dissent -- or at least, it's supposed to allow dissent. If we bully the dissenters, calling them traitors and accusing them of comforting the enemy, the protestors will disappear, afraid to speak out against the government.

That's when the government gets to start doing whatever it wants, whenever it wants.

An America run by jackasses like Dale Petroskey would be no different than Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Hopefully, we'll stop the madness before it gets that far.

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