Rant and Raves – Tom Finneran
Friday, October 23, 2020
Tom Finneran is the former MA Speaker of the House
Happily, the best of human nature makes an occasional breakthrough, mustering a ray of sunshine in the midst of dreary clouds.
Can Major League Baseball and its broadcast partners find an announcer other than the insufferable Joe Buck? There are more than three hundred thirty million Americans living on the fruited plains of our nation and I believe that about two hundred million of them would be a vast improvement over Mr. Buck. MLB apparently believes that their increasingly mediocre product needs an even more mediocre mouthpiece. Can Mr. Buck try an occasional silence? Can he not let the game speak for itself? He is a noisy peacock spouting non-stop inanities. I note that Doc Emrick is retiring from announcing NHL games. I also note that the late great Johnny Most of the Celtics could be exhumed. Either one would enhance any viewer’s enjoyment of the game. Can someone tell the NFL as well?
While we’re talking about sports, is there anything more ridiculous than companies jockeying and paying for the position of “official sponsor” of MLB, or the NFL or the NBA or the NHL? As if when I buy a mattress I’ll be moved by the designation of “Joe’s Sleepy Time Mattress” being the official sponsor of some money-crazed league……………perhaps the only exception would be for “Mike’s Moving Company” being the official moving company for the NFL, when billionaire owners threaten to move their toys to another city unless their host community pays a king’s ransom in taxpayers’ money for even more fat cat luxury suites. Come to think of it, “Sam’s Screw Company” might fit in nicely as yet another official sponsor of franchises who consistently screw their customers.
Do you find it astounding that Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett is attacked as a racist? She has adopted two orphans from Haiti. Apparently, I am insufficiently woke to understand how a white woman adopting two black children is now a racist event. Has the word racist lost all meaning? And might a faithful Catholic woman actually live out her faith in accordance with the teachings of Jesus? As Jesus said, “love one another as I have loved you”. Or, as Martin Luther King spoke of “the brotherhood of man”. Judge Barrett has brought love and care and comfort to two lonely children, lost in an often cruel and harsh world. And so, in the year 2020, she must be loudly condemned. Go figure.
Regarding the Supreme Court, I read that Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg received 96 votes in support of her nomination to the Court in 1993. Some twenty-seven years later, we seem to have fallen below the standards of assessing intellect, experience, and temperament as the essential qualifications for a judicial nominee. More than forty Republican Senators voted in favor of RBG’s confirmation. Stalwart and hard-core Republicans such as Thad Cochran and Trent Lott of Mississippi joined Senator Dole of Kansas, Senator Gramm of Texas, Senator McConnell of Kentucky, and Senator Thurmond of South Carolina in voting to confirm Judge Ginsburg. Does anyone want to hazard a guess on the partisan split we’ll soon see on Judge Barrett’s nomination?
Very loud waves of raves for our Covid-era emergency room nurses and doctors whose perseverance and professionalism set the standard for excellence under pressure. The work is exhausting. The cases are endless, with no relief in sight. They remind me of the medical and firefighting teams at work in London during Nazi Germany’s “Blitz” of that great city. Edward Murrow and Winston Churchill paid homage to the “Cockneys” of London for their mettle under enemy fire. I pay my homage to the emergency room teams of caregivers. We are a very lucky nation to have such saints in our midst. May God bless them and their work.
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