obfuscate: to throw into shadow; to make obscure; confuse; to be evasive, unclear, or confusing (Merriam-Webster)

We — all of us, I think — we need more people in our world with clear vision about things that are happening plus both the ability and the commitment to speak plainly and honestly about those things. Today I come to praise the deobfuscators.

Have you heard, there were people in the White House during the last term who tried to cover up the president’s physical and mental decline? I know, such a shock, right? Or, as the great Charles P. Pierce puts it in Esquire, the hysteria over Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s revelation “that a White House will withhold adverse health information from the public…is, of course, news to those people who remember Grover Cleveland’s secret cancer operation, the unspoken agreement not to photograph FDR in his wheelchair, the relative severity of Eisenhower’s heart problems, the staggering medical record of John F. Kennedy, Nixon’s manic boozing during the height of the Watergate crisis, and, in the closest parallel we have, Reagan’s staff’s successful concealment of the fact that he was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his second term.”

It’s not to say that what is reported in this book is not true; it is to say, rather, “duh.” The diminishment of public dialogue in our time, to a focus on what is shiny and new to the exclusion of all else, makes it easy for us to lose sight of the things that should really matter to our country, to our children’s future. Of course, there are those who prefer it this way:

Life will go back to normal for the elite political media and their useful idiots in the Democratic party. They won’t have to think much about assaults on habeas corpus, deportation of tiny cancer patients, destruction of the regulatory safeguards of the federal government, or clear-cutting of American democracy. Game on!

Earlier this month we all learned that Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, decided to lift the “permanent” ban from baseball issued in 1989 to Pete Rose, which makes Rose eligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Columnist Mike Finger at the San Antonio Express-News elegantly gives voice to the clear reading of events which corporate Baseball would prefer you ignore: MLB dishonestly re-defined “permanent” to mean “lifetime” and cravenly capitulated to a president who can’t keep his tiny tiny hands off of other people’s business.

In one view of America, apparently shared by Manfred, character counts, but it doesn’t count that much. Some sins are unforgivable, but only for a while. History should be honored, but the parts that make us uncomfortable can be omitted.

And above all, principles are what matter, right up until the day someone in power asks you to abandon them.

Within three years, baseball’s all-time leader in hits might be enshrined at last in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Thanks to Manfred’s decision, Rose is eligible to be considered by the veteran’s committee, even though he repeatedly broke the game’s most hallowed rule, even though he denied it for more than a decade, even though he never apologized, and even though the ban he accepted in 1989 was supposed to be “permanent.”

None of those facts changed after Rose died last September at age 83. The only big development since then was that Rose received a public show of support from the president of the United States.

If your consideration is limited to Rose’s career as a player, there’s no doubt he deserves the honor of being in the Hall, starting with the fact the had more hits than any other player, ever. But he was banned because he broke the rule that no player is allowed to bet on baseball, ever. Period.

Rose had his chances to atone for his misdeeds while he was alive, and he never did. He applied for reinstatement in 2015, initially claimed he didn’t bet on sports anymore, then admitted he still did. He kept making appearances in casinos, even after then-commissioner Bud Selig suggested that staying away could provide a path to removing the ban.

(snip)

And now is the time that Manfred chooses to ease off the most notorious betting rule-breaker of his generation?

Apparently, now is indeed the time. Now is the time, even though betting wasn’t the worst of Rose’s alleged transgressions. In 2017, Rose was accused in federal court documents by a woman who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with him when she was 14 or 15 years old in 1973, when Rose was in his 30s. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rose issued a response acknowledging he had sex with the accuser, but “said he believed she was 16 at the time, old enough to legally consent in Ohio.”

In 2022, when an Inquirer reporter asked him about the incident, Rose responded, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”

That, of course, is not an admission of guilt. It’s also probably not a line likely to be included on Rose’s Cooperstown plaque, if he gets one.

It is, however, a reflection of one version of America. As long as the right man is vouching for you, any source of shame can be overlooked, if not outright ignored.

We need people who are on the lookout for attempts to warp the facts of the reality we share, and I’m pleased to have found two more.