Sunday afternoon

So much to keep track of:

The Houston Texans, with a new coach, a refurbished line, and--best of all--rookie sensation Reggie Bush (that's a joke, son) host the Philadelphia Eagles. Houston takes the kick-off. Quarterback David Carr takes the team smartly down the field for the opening touchdown . . . whereupon Philadelphia outscores Houston 21-3 and reduce defensive end Mario (He's not Reggie Bush) Williams to a spectator. Midway through the third quarter, Williams, with a single tackle to his name, actually is a spectator, having been removed for crucial passing downs. Wonderful.

The Houston Astros, with their second chance in three weeks to climb to .500, and thus move as close as two games in the Wild Card race, are in Milwaukee, facing a pitcher (Dave Bush) who is always inexplicably tough on them. Score, 3-0 Brwers, midway.

The New York Yankees lead, 7-0. Ho-hum. Magic number should be 11, maybe 10, by the end of the day.

The number one rule of your fantasy team is that no one gives a damn about your fantasy team. Almost as an act of spite, though, I drafted Bush, who has racked up 7 points for me so far: 50+ yards rushing, 20+ yards receiving.

The Eagles are about to score again.

Will ABC air 'The Path to 9/11'?

Yes, we're told, despite Bill Clinton's last-minute rush to block.

Is there a judge anywhere willing to issue a temporary restraining order?

And--it goes without saying, though it's been said, again and again--what if this were a Republican ex-President

Two other things:

1. I saw most of the Ohio State-Texas game last night on ABC, and didn't see a single ad for "Path to 9/11." I have repeatedly checked ABC's website, and "Path" is still listed to air as scheduled. This would seem to indicate a middle road: ABC will probably air the show, but not push it. It will air and be forgotten two weeks from now.

2. The fulminations on HuffPost have been something to watch. At last count, nine bloggers at one time were featured on the front page--including Rob Reiner's, which interestingly enough did not allow for comments. For most of them, I posted the same thing: Farenheit, "Path," jump ball. My comment prompted this response:

The difference between progressives and neandrathals such as yourself is that we don't make stuff up to prove an ideological point or go to war. We base our opinions on real facts. That's right 'facts' like scientific 'facts.' I know, I know, you don't believe Darwin either. So go back to your trailer park, slap your wife around a little, pick up your guitar and play those Texas country tunes and contemplate all those WMDs that are in Iraq.

Update: Just finished watching the round-table on "This Week"--on ABC, of course. George Will said the two things I've been thinking all week: that first, docu-dramas are a suspect entity in the first place, but--but--Democrats who fawned all over Farenheit 9/11 sure have some nerve.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel went off into Neverland and discussed what movie should have been made, something that would include a film loop of Dick Cheney outlining the connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam. (I'd watch.) When George Will invited her to comment on Farenheit 9/11 she snorted, "Farenheit 9/11 was understood for what it was." Will then asked her, "What was it?" three times; Katrina ignored his question until Fareed Zakaria jumped in, and called it a "pounti-of-view polemic that I denounced, by the way."

To this, one could say, Oh. So this is the latest line of defense: Sure, Farenheit 9/11 is a pack of lies, but since everyone knew it was a pack of lies, that makes it okay. That would come as a surprise to people I spoke to two summers ago, including the woman at a teaching workshop in Olympia, Washington, the week it opened, who predicted that the Bush family would have the movie pulled, especially in my home town. When I returned to Houston and e-mailed her that the movie was not only playing, but playing five miles from the elder Bush' house, she responded, "How can he live with the shame?"

The lesson here is a corollary of the old, "Poetry changes nothing." Harriet Beecher Stowe aside, neither literature nor movies nor TV shows change much of anything. More often these enterprises are a case of preaching to the choir.

My other favorite team, part 7

Unbelievably, with three weeks to go, the Astros find themselves in two pennant races: a real one for the Wild Card, and a fanicful one for the division.

One does not know what to do with the Astros, one of the most exasperating teams of recent years. The team is an uneasy mix of veterans winding down (Clemens, Ausmus, Biggio, maybe even Pettitte), youngsters finding their way (Taveras, Burke, Scott, Bruntlett, Hirsch), and those in between, the ones who leave us all to wonder if they will ever amount to their promise (Ensberg, Lane, Lidge, Qualls, Backe). Remove all these gentlemen, and who remains?

Wheeler, a solid set-up man.

Oswalt, a perennial All-Star and 20-win threat, locked up long-term.

And Berkman, who trails only Ryan Howard and Albert Pujols for the title of best everyday player in the National League.

This will be some batting order in two years.

Anyway, tomorrow the 'Stros go out to reach .500 for the first time in months. The team that can't score, that can't hold a lead, that can't supply anything but solid starting pitching and above-average fielding is three games out.

Three weeks to go.

Yankees 3, Orioles 2

This win, coupled with Boston's 14-inning loss to Kansas City, may be it. I actually saw more of the Boston game than the Yankees (flipping back and forth between the Red Sox and Ohio State-Texas), and Boston's game could not have gone worse (or, if you root for the Yankees, better). A waste of a tolerably competent start by Josh Beckett, a burn straight through the bullpen, a cheapo Royal home run that wrapped around Pesky's Pole--all right, I'll say it. It's over.

As for the Yankees: we are seeing the fruits of the first solid group of Yankee prospects-turned-stars since the Bernie-Jeter-Pettitte-Rivera-Posada crowd in the early nineties. Wang is not only part of the bunch that contains Melky and Cano, he may be at the head of it. One must conclude that Joe Torre has already figured Wang's work through the rest of the season, to coincide with game one of the Divisional Series, against (if current trends hold) either the eminently beatable White Sox or the harder-to-beat (if Liriano is healthy) Twins.

One wonders about the injuries. When the Yankees zoomed out to a double-digit lead early in 1998, they began disabling players who didn't need it (Tino Martinez comes to mind) just to keep them rested and relaxed for the playoffs. Can we wonder if this is the case for Rivera, for Giambi, for Moose? If the three of them are healthy, if the Unit pitches as he's been pitching, it appears a not-insurmountable much stands between these Yankees and a World Series showdown with the Mets.

Will ABC pull "Path to 9/11"?

It's just past halftime in the Ohio State-Texas game (17-7 Buckeyes) and I'm struck by this thought: Not one ad for "The Path to 9/11," which supposedly airs tomorrow and which presumably might have some attraction for the college football-watching crowd.

I'm tired of watching Jerry Springer dance (I imagine he'll be the second to go, after Tucker Carlson). The pretty-cool commercial of various people humming in anticipation of "Monday Night Football" is here. But no "Path" commercials, so far as I've seen.

Is this a precursor?

Birds 9, Yanks 4

Yankees hold serve, and reduce magic number to 14.

Turning and turning

"The Path to 9/11" is rising to, if not the intensity of Memogate, something of a junior-league variety.

Dean Barnett, the sainted Soxblog, now guest-blogging on Hewitt, has the latest.

I find the whole thing hysterical. As Barnett maintains, had Clinton and Berger and the rest kept their mouths shut, the film would have come and gone. Lord knows I wouldn't have watched it--the Vikings play Sunday night and I have fantasy implications. Now I'll at least DVR it.

There can't be enough lies to suit me.

The ABC kerfuffle

Democrats urge ABC to withdraw 0/11 movie.

The whole time I've been following this controversy, I have thought of the conversations I had with my liberal friends all through the summer of 2004. I had gone to Farenheit 9/11 (bought a ticket to another movie, mind you--Moore wasn't getting one penny of my money), and afterward, when I would bring up one of David Kopel's 57 irrefutable Moore falsehoods, my friends would merely smile and say, "So? Moore's our Rush Limbaugh. Big deal." When I asked what falsehood Limbaugh had ever perpetrated that was one-tenth as tententious as (to name one of dozens) Moore's Afghan pipeline canard, they'd say, "Well, Femi-Nazis," and then parrot Roger Ebert's idiotic statement, "The important thing in a documentary isn't truth, it's emotional impact," a position so morally obtuse as to defy response.
The current right-wing defense of the ABC movie misses the point.

So now? I want the ABC movie to be false. A hundred libelous distortions of the Clinton administration won't be enough for me. A thousand will barely sait me. A want long denunciations to be published in The Nation and Mother Jones, complete with links and footnotes and circles and arrows and stuff. And then I want to respond. "So? It's our Farenheit 9/11. Big deal.'"

To paraphrase George Will in another context: No, two wrongs don't make a right. But maybe an 18th or 27th wrong might wake a few people up.

So stop bombing Israel

"Gaza is a jail . . . We are all starving now."

Bibi plans for return to Israeli premiereship

At last.

Yankees 8, Royals 3

A two-thirds no-hitter for the Unit, which, coupled with the Red Sox' loss to the White Sox, lowers the magic number to 15.

Rule number one in life: No one cares about your fantasy team. (I got Peyton Manning.) But that's what occupied me tonight.

Royals 5, Yankees 0

No help for a rusty Moose.

Yankees 12, Royals 5

A confession: I mised the first, the important, portion of the top of the eighth, when the Yanks scored six runs and basically demoralized the Royals out of the game. Different circumstances, I could see the White Sox or (pre-catastrophe) Red Sox coming back, and maybe the Angels or Mets. Not the Royals, though.

Did anyone notice? A-Rod, on base twice in the eighth, and scored twice. Which only encourages people to write, "Nyanh, nyah, who cares, they won by seven runs." Which misses the point. They won by seven runs in no small part because of him.

We can write off Wang's outing as an unfortunate accumulation of bloops and bleeders. More important, the exhausted bunch (Proctor, Kyle, Mo) gets another day of rest.

Magic number is at 17. I'm hoping they clinch on September 24th at the latest, so to give their tired bullpen arms a chance.

This is the most single-minded Yankee team I remember since 1998, a team (like that team, maybe the best ever) that can beat you 16-14 or 2-1, either way.

Yankees 10, Twins 1

Clearly, Torre is pointing toward October. With the Yankees' lead now at nine games, with the Red Sox unfurling the white flag (aka the trade of David Wells), the question is now how many games Torre will leave open to sacrifice, and to resting the corps of the exhausted, roughly Kyle, Proctor, Mo, Georgie, Mussina, and probably the Unit. The Yankees are headed toward a first-rounf series against the Wild Card, as the Wild Card will almost certainly come from the Central, the guts-needing Twins or the youthful White Sox.

Magic Number: 18, coupled with the Red Sox' loss.

Post number 300

With thanks this time to the anonymous readers who have weighed in.

Trojans 50, Razorbacks 14

So much, early on, for rebuilding.

Some preliminary thoughts:

1. John David Booty went to school on learning the offense over the past two years.

2. Dwayne Jarrett and Steve Smith, probably the best receiving tandem in the country, are going to be huge.

3. These guys are fast.

4. The defense: opportunistic as usual.

5. Booty. I mean, wow.

Of course, you never know from one game. This might be an Arkansas team that ends up 4-7. But--running, passing, line play, turnovers considered--the evening could hardly have gone better.

Twins 6, Yankees 1

But the Red Sox lose, dropping the Magic number to (I believe) 20. And no one was hurt.

Lee Siegel gone

The New Republic, which was nearly sunk by the Stephen Glass fiasco, has discovered that Lee Siegel was commenting on his blog, to give the impression of readership.

John Podoretz at NRO's The Corner says Siegel was attempting "to give the impression that his blog had at least one reader."

Yipes.

No Mo?

Mo Rivera is out for at least a few days with forearm difficulties. I was about to type "this could not come at a worse time," but in fact the opposite is true. With the Yankees lead at 8, the Red Sox' two leaders (Varitek and Papi) both out, with the hitters hitting, with even A-Rod coming out of his near-catatonic slump, Mo's injury--if it had to happen--could not come at a better time.

Having written that, know this: there will be no World Series without a healthy Rivera. He is the franchise, and he has the record to prove it. When MLB.com introduced its online survey, whereby people could vote for one of five players on each team as that team's franchise player, four nominees from the Yankees were a foregone conclusion: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, baseball's Mount Rushmore. I've no problem with Yogi Berra as number five, but I would have picked Rivera, for no other reason than on the all-time varsity (eight position players, right-hander, left-hander, reliever), he is the only no-doubter besides Ruth in right field.

Get well, Mo.

Yankees 8, Twins 1

I get the feeling that Torre has the team turning for home. With enough rest for Proctor, Kyle, Mo.

Am I alone?