Credit Where Due

(Note: A.F.O.M.G. will be in with a post later this afternoon.)

First off, I'm suddenly and unmistakably proud of young Sip. More on that soon.

But elsewise, I'm a little offended by some people's inability to take a joke.

World Series MVP David Eckstein, for example. The Cards' pint-sized hero was in the TNA Wrestling ring last Sunday when White Sox catcher and all-around misanthrope A.J. Pierzynski picked a copy of Eckstein's new children's book and tore it to shreds.

Funny, no? Well, Eckstein started a brawl over it. I mean, come on.

Even more disspiriting was the reaction of one Michael Crowley, a senior editor at the New Republic, who got all offended this week at uber-author Michael Crichton.

Here's the background -- Crichton wrote a best-selling book in 2004, "State of Fear," which essentially said global warming was a conspiracy dreamed up by sinister liberal interests. (AFOMG is nodding his head vigorously right now). Naturally, writing this novel made him qualified to advise the White House on policy matters, and the administration brought him in.

Crowley, who covers Washington for the magazine, wrote a big article about this exchange last year; the subject apparently didn't think much of it.

I say apparently, because all anybody knows about it is that Crichton's new book, "Next," features a character named "Mick Crowley," who ... well, there's something going on here.

Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...

The real Crowley, needless to say, certainly went to Yale. But there's more.

It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

Now, how does the oh-so-sensitive real Crowley react to being called a baby-raper? Typically, he got somewhat angry. No self-control among these people, I tells ya. Where's the discipline?

In all seriousness, I still can't believe this happened. This got picked up in the Times and elsewhere, but none of these articles had any reponse from Crichton, nor is there any on his Web site.

Plausible defenses include:

• "It wasn't just the boy. Crowley was getting into sick shit with dangerous Japanese business interests."
• "Aliens promised to make me rich and powerful if I defamed him."
• "You don't understand. Crowley was the one who sexually harassed me!"
• "He doesn't know what he's done! That boy's rectum was a quantum foam wormhole."

And so forth. If he can come up with something better, I'm all ears. Wouldn't count on it, though.

Which brings me back to young Sip, the angriest of all the Y2K team members. This kid's capacity to hate cannot be measured by modern instrumentation.

We all have quite a bit of anti-Yankee sentiment stored up, we do. We absolutely feel certain members of the Bombers, A-Rod and Jeter most notably, have taken pains to personally offend us with their words and behavior. We have all felt slapped in the face by the team and its media enablers. Betrayed.

None more than Sip. But the kid's a fighter, and I'll tell you why. For all the openings he's had to declare one of his beisbol enemies a genuine, Y2K-certified baby rapist, he hasn't done it.

He hasn't made wild and possibly actionable claims about Steve Serby's sexual habits. He hasn't slyly slipped a "Posada molests toddlers" into one of his rants. He doesn't feel free to make up anything he likes about "Joe Torry."

Not once. Not that I'm aware of, at least. And I salute him.

You might be saying to yourself, does this site really deserve credit for not accusing its enemies of sodomizing infants? Aren't you setting the bar a little bit low? They are, of course, fair questions.

Information on how to answer them can be found here.

[Note: Images used in this post were taken from Google Images and Wikipedia.]