How to handle a scandal
A story about classified documents, climate change and baseball...
I was on vacation (if you can call treading water in Los Angeles a vacation) when the Biden document scandal broke and it seemed like the media was bending over backwards (or in this case, maybe it’s forwards) to give Biden the benefit of the doubt and say his document scandal was completely different than Trump’s document scandal because Biden had fewer than 12 documents and returned them voluntarily while Trump had 11,000 documents and fought giving them back.
Exceeept…
Biden’s team discovered more documents and failed to disclose that right away and anytime you have to explain how your screw-up is different than somebody else’s screw-up you might be beating a deaf horse because people tend to stop listening right after they hear the word “screw-up.”
As you might have already noticed, The American Public is not big on details.
Like the fact that Republicans are currently saying we absolutely have to do something about out-of-control spending now that Biden is president, but were OK with adding $7 trillion to the national debt while Trump was in the White House, a point which should be made in a cartoon and if I make it to Monday, will be.
Anyway…
Biden’s document scandal reminds me of the Houston Astros and the pandemic.
Not long after it was revealed that the Astros had been cheating their asses off, the pandemic forced the cancellation of spring training and the delay of the regular season and former Big League ballplayer Jason Kendall said the Astros might be some of the only people in the United States who felt relieved about the pandemic because without COVID everybody would have spent the summer talking about the Astros cheating their way to a World Series Championship.
I believe there’s a lesson there for all of us and here it is:
If you get in trouble, stall.
I’ve been watching people screw-up for decades (it’s pretty much what I do for a living) and the dumb screw-ups call press conferences and try to explain why they had two pounds of coke and a body in the trunk of their car and then those explanations are examined and dissected and all this keeps the story alive, while the smart screw-ups (if there is such a thing) keep their mouths shut and stall for time.
They say they haven’t had time to read the indictment or they need to talk to their lawyers before they comment or they’re going to rehab and once all that’s done then they’d just love to tell their side of the story, which hints that once you hear it, you’ll understand the whole two-pounds-of-coke-dead-body escapade. Then they keep their heads down until somebody else screws up and the media gets distracted by another story.
In this particular case, Joe Biden might’ve bailed out Donald Trump because now it sounds like pretty much everybody in government has Top Secret documents lying around their house to line bird cages, start fires or train new puppies.
As previously mentioned, it rained unusually hard while I was in Los Angeles.
When I first heard about climate change, I thought it would be something my great grandkids or their great grandkids would deal with and it would never affect me so put that on the Big List of Stuff I Was Wrong About which includes, but is not limited to thinking:
1. The internet is just a fad.
2. COVID 19 is no worse than the regular, old flu.
3. And baseball would reverse course once they saw how analytics slowed the game down and fans stopped buying tickets because they don’t want to watch a home run derby that lasts 3 hours.
BTW: I’m still waiting for baseball to come to its senses and realize just maybe it’s a bad idea to force fans to download apps to attend games (you can no longer go to the Royals ticket office and buy a paper ticket) and then put those games on a channel that most of us don’t have, all of which is kinda like opening a fast-food restaurant and forcing people to run an obstacle course before they get to the counter which as you might have already noticed, McDonald’s doesn’t do.
McDonald’s makes it easy to get fat.
And making your product easy to find and consume would seem to be good business, but Major League Baseball has done the opposite which might explain why attendance has been dropping steadily since 2012.
The movie Moneyball came out in 2011 and it helped convince a bunch of stat geeks that they knew how to “fix” baseball teams and now some of them are actually running those teams and if you think the two events – the rise of analytics and the drop in attendance – are unrelated I think you’re wrong, but it just took me three tries to correctly type “wrong” because the first attempt came out “wong” and the second attempt came out “wring” so feel free to dismiss my opinions because as I’ve already admitted I’ve been “wong” and/or “wring” about a lot of stuff in the past.
Anyway…
Climate change is clearly happening way faster than I thought it would and I’m guessing I’m not alone because if you Google “The Industrial Revolution” you’ll be told it started in about 1740 which means after about 4.5 billion years of the Earth being pretty much OK as long as we kept riding horses and making stuff by hand, we managed to fuck up our planet in less than three centuries.
Speaking of which…
I recently read a story about species that need to be relocated because climate change has ruined their current home address and the above cartoon shows some of the species mentioned in the article and it occurred to me that humans might be on the list.
But let’s face it, if we ever make it to Mars we’ll still want pickups the size of small nations and SUVs that get really shitty gas mileage and before long we’ll be wondering if it’s time to move to Jupiter because we also managed to screw up Mars.
OK.
That’s it for today because I’ve got to get going and be ready to watch the Chiefs play the Jaguars this afternoon even though my last post was critical of the NFL and the damage football does to players so you can add that to the list of things that worry me in the Long Run, but I won’t do jack shit to change in the Present which is pretty much how we ended up having to move to Mars.
Enjoy the game because I bet a bunch of you are going to watch it, too.
I'd like to see a cartoon of a $trillion coin in a glass cabinet with a plate that says break glass in case of default.