Good morning,

This newsletter is a little late this week because my four-year-old had a Tee Ball game this morning, and I went along to cheer for him. Later this afternoon, my five-year-old has his own game. These are our Saturdays now, and I absolutely love them.

Usually, late February and early March are the worst times of the year, sports-wise. Football is over, and baseball hasn't started yet, which leaves me with basketball (of which I'm not a particular fan), hockey (which I'm told I would like, but haven't got into yet), and soccer (which I like a great deal, but happens only once a week). This year, my kids' Tee Ball games have filled that void nicely — and not in a patronizing sort of way, but in an earnest, non-ironic, wait-I-actually-care-about-this sort of way.

I do not mean by this that I would be disappointed in my kids if their team lost. Nor — heaven forfend — do I mean that I am likely to shout at the kids' coach, or offer him unsolicited advice, or become annoyed by a bad call. I'm not. But, viscerally, I have become just as invested in these matchups as I would a given New York Yankees game. My wife tells me that the score "doesn't matter." But it absolutely does! The existence of that score — and its effect on the league they play in — is the difference between a practice and a game. Rules raise the stakes, and when the stakes are raised, we start caring. Of course I'm tracking the outs and the runs and looking to see who is up next. That's why the game is being held.

Occasionally, Kevin Williamson and I touch on sports on our podcast, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, and I am reminded that some people are instinctively "sports people" and some people are not. Kevin simply does not get sucked into competition in the way many (most?) Americans do. Whatever that gene is, he doesn't possess it. I, by contrast, am a sucker. Given the right circumstances — and a rooting interest, real or contrived — I would probably get into competitive snail racing if there were nothing else going on. I can remember going to my first baseball game — as a tourist from the U.K. back in 2005 — and cheering like a lunatic throughout. Afterwards, the guy who took me said, "I had no idea you were a Twins fan." "I'm not," I said. "I just picked them at the outset, and got carried away by my decision."

There is a school of thought that holds that this instinct is useless — perhaps even dangerous. In this view, sports represent an expensive and frivolous distraction that keep people from pursuing more fruitful endeavors or from developing useful skills. And sure: at some point, every sports fan has found himself wondering what on earth he's doing getting so caught up in the fate of a team to which he doesn't belong, during a game whose outcome doesn't matter. But, upon further reflection, I think this critique falls apart pretty fast. For a start, it's not particularly "useful" for most people to spend their time listening to music. But so what? There's nothing wrong with being passively made to feel something by an activity that, when analyzed coldly, is not improving your material conditions or your understanding of the world. To demand such things of all popular activities is Puritanism at its worst.

And even beyond that, I think there is a pretty solid utilitarian case for sports — yes, including just watching them. Among the functions that sports fulfill, we have:

• a replacement for war and tribalism — a quick glance at human history teaches us that it is far preferable for human beings (especially young men) to take out their fighting instincts by watching the NFL than by invading Poland;
• a way of teaching people of all sorts to accept and respect a set of neutral and universally applicable rules, as well as to discover how to win and lose gracefully when thrown into contact with people who support the other team;
• a quasi-religious outlet that bonds people to place (think of college football, in particular);
• a forum within which men especially can bond, and in which, irrespective of generational changes, parents and grandparents are able to pass down some of the things they love to their kids and grandkids (some of my favorite time spent with my Dad has been spent watching Manchester United);
• a benign channel for whatever it is in many men that leads them to agonize over the itemization of their record collections or to remember fifty years' worth of baseball scores (Simon Baron-Cohen argues that autism is, in one sense, "extreme maleness")

The very worst form of the anti-sports argument holds that sports are a problem because they "displace" news and current events. First off, this isn't really true: people who don't care about politics do not ignore politics because they like sports; they ignore politics because they don't care about politics. I know an awful lot of people — many of them are my colleagues at NR — who are both sports obsessives and extremely well-informed about the news. There is no either/or here.

Second: to turn sports into the enemy of politics is to forget why we have politics in the first place — which, simply put, is to make space for other things. If anything, our cultural problem at the moment is the other way around — namely, that, spurred on by social media, we have turned politics into a team sport, and crowded out everything else. A well-informed population is important, of course. But the idea that there is something intrinsically wrong with the average person being able to name the starting QB for the Green Bay Packers but unable to name the Speaker of the House is grotesque. Politics is the means. Civil society is the end. And, understood properly, sports are civil society.

Obviously, I am a political person. I care. But I also care defensively. My primary reason for getting involved in politics is to defend the sort of constitutional order that allows me to spend my Saturdays getting completely wrapped up in a friendly game of Tee Ball, rather than shouting at strangers on the Internet for the decisions that some mayor somewhere has made on behalf of a place where I don't even live. That, not my kids, is the "time suck."

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Best,

Charles

On Tuesday,  I felt moved to point out that, while it was a good thing that the Senate failed to pass a set of nationalized abortion rules, conservatives should not accept the premise that it could have done so if the votes had been there:

The federal government enjoys only the limited powers that are delegated to it by the federal Constitution, and setting abortion policy is obviously not among them. Abortion is not “Commerce,” as that term was originally understood by the public — and nor is it a tax, duty, impose, excise, debt, or credit; a rule of naturalization or bankruptcy; a standard or weight of measure; a punishment against counterfeiting; a post office or postal road — or the use of them; a type of patent; a lower court; an example of piracy or felony committed on the high seas; a matter of war, or a letter of marque and reprisal, or an army or navy; or a calling forth of, or disciplining of, the militia. Abortion is not spending; it’s not naturalization policy; it’s not the addition of a new state or territory; it’s not the time, place, or manner of a federal election. Nor, in either direction, does abortion come within the purview of any of the 27 amendments that have been added to the Constitution since 1787. It is, in short, precisely the sort of question that is reserved to the people and to the states, and any Supreme Court decision that has concluded to the contrary is wrong — yes, including the 2003 law that prohibited the abomination that is partial-birth abortion, and which should have been struck down by the Court for lack of an enumerated power to justify it.

"It would," I concluded:

be utterly extraordinary if, having spent fifty years trying to convince the public and the courts that the Constitution is silent on abortion, conservatives applied this principle only to the judicial branch. Roe v. Wade is bad law because it involves judges usurping power that does not belong to them. What the Democrats tried to do yesterday is bad for the same reason — and it should be resisted with equal enthusiasm and vigor.

I also cautioned against triumphalism on the matter of Ukraine. What I would like to happen in Ukraine, I noted, is that:

Outraged by Russia’s aggression, armed Ukrainians in both the country’s military and its spontaneously formed civilian militias are able to fight hard enough in all regions that the demoralized and confused Russian army retreats with its tail between its legs. Appalled by the spectacle, and vowing “never again,” the international community comes together to turn Russia into a pariah state — limiting its access to international institutions, weakening its economy, draining the country of talent, and making Vladimir Putin’s position untenable even within his own circle. Alarmed by their vulnerability, previously unreliable nations such as Germany commit to increasing defense spending and to taking NATO more seriously. In the West, the tales of Ukrainian bravery become the stuff of legend, and in Ukraine, President Zelensky cruises to reelection as the new symbol of national resolve. In casual conversation, “Zelensky” and “Putin” become avatars of Good and Evil, while “invading Ukraine” becomes colloquial shorthand for “doing something stupid.” Putin is forced out of office, and Russia reforms itself. The experiment is universally deemed to have been a failure, and we learn that, despite all odds, the world has changed substantially since the mid 20th century.

But it may not, and, as a result:

Americans should be careful not to get carried away, or to become so obsessed with hating the bad guys and loving the good guys that they become unaware of the details on the ground. Despite what the media would like to be true, Americans do not actually need to be fed infantile or cynical analogies in order to discern that Russia is the bad actor here: As of yesterday, just 2 percent of Republicans and Democrats thought that the United States had been “too tough” in response to Putin’s aggression, while 80 percent of Republicans and 44 percent of Democrats believed that it had not been “tough enough.” What we need is to be leveled with — about the real state of the war, about the most likely set of outcomes, and about the broader knock-on effects that might result. We need to grasp the potential consequences of escalation, and the potential consequences of inaction. We need to ask ourselves tough questions such as “If Russia were to invade Poland, should American soldiers be deployed?” and “At what point are we willing to fight?” We need to distinguish between war propaganda — which has a real value to those fighting — and the truth. And, perhaps most important of all, we need to evaluate our non-violent responses on their long-term merits, as well as within the existing good guy–bad guy dichotomy.

There are some tough questions ahead.

On Wednesday, I reviewed Joe Biden's State of the Union address, which was a mess:

The singer David Bowie liked to write lyrics by cutting scribbled notes into pieces, throwing them wildly up into the air, and then reassembling them at random. Joe Biden’s speech last night had the same tone. Indeed, with the exception of his nod to Ukraine, Biden’s address wasn’t an address, so much as it was a series of “and one more thing . . .” exclamations of the sort one might suffer through from a lazy drunk at a bar. Biden empathized mawkishly with the victims of inflation, but then lauded the binge that helped it spiral. He used “Built in America” as a slogan, but then outlined an agenda that would ensure it never happens. He lied about the things he always lies about — the protections that are supposedly enjoyed by firearms companies, the distribution of the 2017 tax cuts, that as president he has “created” millions of jobs; he shouted about the things that excite him; and he ignored the things that do not. The Afghanistan withdrawal, which he still maintains was an “extraordinary success,” was not mentioned at all.

The delivery wasn't much better:

As a rule, I am a dove when it comes to politicians’ rhetorical mistakes. Presidents are busy and tired and constantly in motion, and from time to time they are bound to forget which city they are in or to mispronounce a foreign word. But with Biden, it is relentless. Because they must, the president’s apologists like to pretend that his shortcomings are the product of a persistent childhood “stutter.” But this, of course, is nonsense, as anyone who remembers him ten years ago can attest. Simply put, Joe Biden can no longer speak properly. He slurs and mangles his words; he struggles mightily to distinguish between concepts — and contexts; his memory cannot keep up with his folksy off-script digressions, which now end with a trail-off or a pivot or an involuntary Kerouacian riff. Unable to read or process the contents of the Teleprompter, Biden talked last night about “a pound of Ukrainian people,” confused “Ukrainian” with “Iranian” (provoking a mouthed correction from Kamala Harris), referenced “other freedee loving nations,” and praised the Ukrainian “mall of strength.” And those were just the highlights. Throughout, Biden exhibited the talent for compressing full sentences into single words that brought us his campaign-trail commitment to “truindenashendduvbapresser.” No wonder Nancy Pelosi looked so nervous.

And on Thursday, I lamented that we have entered the booing-dachshunds-in-the-street part of the Russia-Ukraine conflict:

In the last 48 hours, I have read that “the International Cat Federation” — that pillar of civilization — “has banned Russian cats from its international competitions”; that the Paralympics “will deny access to athletes from Russia and Belarus”; that the state of New Hampshire is removing “bottles of Russian vodka from New Hampshire’s state-run liquor stores”; that EA Sports intends to “remove the Russian National Team and all Russian club soccer teams from its FIFA video game franchise, and remove all Russian and Belarusian hockey teams from the latest NHL video game franchise”; and that Russian chess player Alexander Grischuk has been “kicked out of a forthcoming tournament” in Norway, despite being a critic of the war that has caused his ejection. From here, booing dogs seems the obvious next step.

I can certainly imagine a situation in which one country’s behavior became so extraordinary — and the threat that it posed became so total — that another country needed to take the sort of zero-tolerance line that includes the superintendence of cat-fancying. In 1940, Nazi Germany posed such a threat to Great Britain. But, clearly, Russia isn’t at that point yet, because, if it were, we would have stopped buying its oil. We are not expected, I hope, to believe that it is imperative that we expel Russian pixels from our video games, but a mere matter of taste whether we cease to purchase Russian energy? Somehow, that would seem a failure to get our priorities straight.

For my full archive at National Review, you can click here.

I appeared on The Megyn Kelly Show again this week to discuss the Joe Biden's State of the Union address. I was on a full hour. If you prefer video to audio, you can watch the appearance here:

I was on two episodes of The Editors this week. On the first, we talked about Ukraine, Biden’s SCOTUS pick, and CPAC. On the second, we discussed Ukraine, Biden’s State of the Union Address, and more. You can subscribe to The Editors on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and more, or listen online at National Review.

On this week's episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Kevin and I talked about the stunted American reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. You can subscribe to Mad Dogs and Englishmen on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and more, or listen online at National Review.

Watching: Wag the Dog

No, not because I think the war in Ukraine is fake! But I did see some fools on Twitter arguing that the war in Ukraine is fake, which reminded me of this movie, which prompted me to rewatch it. (The Mark Knopfler soundtrack helped spur my interest, too.)

For those who don't know, Wag the Dog is about a small group of White House officials who, in an attempt to distract from a presidential sex scandal, simply invent a war. I last saw this movie in about 1999, and I had a couple of new thoughts this time around. The first was that the movie is so, so much more sinister than I had remembered; back in the nineties, I can remember thinking it was ultimately funny. The second was that the storyline — which is far-fetched to begin with — would be entirely impossible now, for the same reason as Home Alone would no longer work: the ubiquity of cell phones. In 2022, there is simply no way that one could make up a war in a faraway country without a host of private citizens pointing out conclusively that it wasn't true. I'm told that HBO is thinking of making a TV series based on the film. If so, they'd better think of a clever way around that, or it's going to seem ridiculous.

All that said, the movie is made by the performances — especially Dustin Hoffman's — so if you can suspend belief for a little while, it's worthwhile.

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