Anal Loogies

Debate rages, on Slate and, I'm sure, elsewhere, about Judge Roberts' baseball analogy (to paraphrase, he's an umpire, he doesn't get to bat or pitch, which is his secret code to all of America that he will not be an activist judge, at least not in a way the Republican establishment doesn't want him to be). Dahlia Lithwick, who is writing her little Canadian ass off at a rate so astounding that I cannot sort out the links for you, first mocks, then adopts, the baseball analogy, yesterday likening Roberts to a man "standing in a batting cage with the pitching machine set way too slow" after accepting the premise that this whole analogy is symbolic of Roberts' overpoweringly stenchful humility.

What a pinko Canadian living in close proximity to the University of that hypocritical bootlick, false humanist, French-lover Thomas Jefferson knows about baseball or American law escapes me, but I've always sort of liked Lithwick, who seems to get it right more often than not, so I'll let her pass with just those few gratuitous and irrelevant insults.

Then Jack Shafer, whom I have recently insulted in these pages, gets into the act, pointing out quite correctly that what Roberts meant, in point of fact, is that a strike is what the umpire says it is. Roberts' baseball metaphor is his humble little nose-thumbing at the Senate. And you. If he is confirmed (and he will be), he will do whatever the fuck he pleases, which is actually okay, because it's what God intended--that the Chief Justice do whatever the fuck he pleases, I mean, not that the Chief Justice be a closeted frottageur with swastikas tattooed on the insides of his eyelids.

Shafer--and many of Slate's readers, apparently, although I can't be bothered to decipher what they have to say--continue the baseball shit ad nauseam. It puts me in mind of a line of FedEx commercials that I first saw over the weekend: businesspersons in meetings use football analogies in meetings, and are immediately scolded by uniformed NFL players (Jerome Bettis was one of them) who tell them to just shut the fuck up and use FedEx.

I had a brilliant column laid out as I was driving to work. Then I spent 10 minutes on the phone with Sasha, and it all evaporated. I have no idea what the fuck I was thinking of writing--maybe something about asshats, but I don't remember which ones. Good thing I have a Web to riff on, huh?