Friday, December 10, 2010

I Don't Believe Luke Scott


Daniel P. Moynihan
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I would truly doubt that Orioles left fielder, designated hitter, first baseman and good ol' country boy Luke
Scott has ever heard of the late Mr Moynihan, who rose from poverty to become, in 76 years, a four-term US Senator from New York, ambassador to the United Nations and to India, assistant Secretary of Labor, and a presidential advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford.
 
Luke Scott is 32, and, as Casey Stengel would have said, in ten years he's got a chance to be 42.
A well-regulated militiaman
 
Scott is paid well to hit a baseball and, occasionally, catch one hit by others (not his strong suit.)  And he already had the eyebrows of others raised last winter when he said, after being told he could not bring his gun to work with him, “I don’t think that everyone else should pay for the mistakes of a few. There is a good reason behind the rule, I can’t deny that. The reason is you cannot trust 25 guys in a locker room to have the same respect and training as I do with a weapon. That I do understand. I’ve carried a gun for 10 years. I’ve carried them in the locker room, and nobody really knows about it. I know how to handle myself, and I stow it away where nobody really knows about it.” 
 
 
Son, you work in Baltimore City, where there is already a major problem with armed people.  Surely you can understand the reluctance of your employers to allow you to pack your, uh, substitute when you come to work.  They fear you might start shooting the towel guy or something.  

But we all survived the 2010 baseball season unarmed, didn't we, Luke?  So now this winter, you just had to show up at the baseball winter meetings and start firing off your mouth on the subject of the president of the United States.  Herewith a sampling of the wisdom that stands in left field at Camden Yards:
 
"Obama does not represent America, nor does he represent anything that our forefathers stood for."

The reporter from a Yahoo! baseball blog then
asked Scott, "You don't think that Obama wasn't born in the United States, do you?"

"He was not born here," Scott said. "That's my belief. I was born here. If someone accuses me of not being born here, I can go -- within 10 minutes -- to my filing cabinet and I can pick up my real birth certificate and I can go, 'See? Look! Here it is. Here it is.'"

OK.  First of all, most everyone else - even the most rabid on the right  - has moved on past this issue of the president's birth.  We are certain that it occurred, what with the way we see him walkin' and talkin' and runnin' the country, you betcha.   And we know that it occurred in 1961 in Hawaii, which was at that time one of the states of the Union.

What we don't know is how Luke Brandon Scott, from out of DeLeon Springs, FL, can sleep at night when the president's birthplace so roils his fevered soul.  Perhaps growing at home there, bathing in the fountain of youth allegedly discovered by Juan Ponce de León, young Luke decided to avoid growing old by not growing up.

He is entitled to his beliefs, but not to his false facts.

Luke Scott heads for his filing cabinet, seeking vital records
I believe that every young man is entitled to strike out on his own, that's what I believe. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Luke Scott is correct and I am not on the far right either. Millions of Americans know that there is something fishy with Obama and it is just the commentators that say we are beyond that issue. He certainly doesn't represent me. I voted for Cynthia McKinney, by the way.

Mark said...

You have every right to agree with Luke Scott on anything you want to, but you can't say that Mr Obama does not represent you. Like him or not, he is the president, and he represents you, just as I had to endure being represented by GWB for eight of the worst years of American history.