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Politics makes you yearn for baseball’s standards

So as we near the end of the Major League Baseball regular season, it seems the new rules have gone down just fine. You know, the pitch clock and bigger bases and such haven’t changed the sport, really – baseball is still about throwing a ball, hitting a ball and catching a ball. There are no tackles and blocks, no headers, and nobody aims a jab at a jaw. That happens in other sports. There are rules against that in baseball.  

You know, sport is just so much more civilized and orderly than the rest of life – such as politics, notably. In a free society, the rules of politics are set and enforced by the choices of citizens. By votes. But there’s where you get to a dilemma. There ought to be a fundamental rule in politics: You must tell the truth.  

But judging by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision to try to impeach President Biden, there’s no regard for that would-be rule in the House Republican majority. And since we live these days in a siloed media ecosystem, the right-wing fan base is largely oblivious to the web of lies being spun by the political players they cheer.  

The news media used to be the sort of referee to call some material foul. No more, with Fox News and NewsMax and other right-wing outlets feeding viewers a steady diet of misinformation. You might think that they’re cheating, but it’s more accurate to say that they’re competing in a different ballpark. They’ve walked off the field of democracy.  

Look at what McCarthy said in announcing the Biden impeachment investigation. The allegations sound very troubling – but folks, they’re as thin as a dry leaf in autumn. There is simply no evidence linking Joe Biden to the “high crimes and misdemeanors” that the Constitution sets as the standard for impeachment.  

In fact, House committees probing Hunter Biden have drawn testimony of the opposite – that while the president’s son earned millions of dollars from foreign sources before his dad got to the White House, not a buck of it went to Joe Biden, nor did he do anything with the intent of aiding those business deals.  

This misrepresentation, or fabrication, or fibbing – or whatever you want to call it – isn’t surprising. Most Republican officials have joined Donald Trump’s absolutely fallacious claim that he was cheated out of re-election in 2020. The right-wing media is still trying to convince us that the January 6th attack on the Capitol was just an exercise of free speech – never mind, you know, the 140 police officers who were assaulted by Trump-crazed partisans.  

It's also not true, as Republicans claim, that the Democrats want to send 87,000 IRS agents into the field to harass small businesses, or that Biden wants to open the southern border so millions of immigrants can replace people who are born citizens.  

The purveyors of these notions are about as trustworthy as the 1919 Chicago White Sox. Distortion and fabrication have become the tactics of the right, as surely as performance-enhancing drugs were the tactics of cheaters ranging from Roger Clemens to Lance Armstrong.  

That’s where we come in. In a democracy, we are not only the referees, but also the league executives. We need to be at least as bold about our nation’s political system as the overseers of sports are about changing the rules to protect the profits that their games generate.  

We need to enforce what ought to be the fundamental rule of truth, by loudly and continually protesting those who disregard it. Journalists ought to incessantly insist upon accountability from politicians who are purveyors of untruth – like the supporters of McCarthy’s lies in launching the impeachment. Voters must confront officials who convey their disrespect by imagining that we’re not smart enough to recognize a lie when we hear it.  

What’s being contested on this field is the survival of democracy itself. Since it’s citizens and news consumers who essentially get to decide which players get to stay in the game, we have only ourselves to blame if we fail to stand up for the rules. And if we want democracy to win this contest, we need to insist that Rule No. 1 is this: Tell the truth.  

Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.

The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.

Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack."
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