The Patriot Post® · Biden Whiffs on MLB Move

As Thomas Jefferson once said, “He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual.” Democrats are indeed habitual liars, and their water carriers in the Leftmedia happily parrot rather than challenge those lies. In this case, the lies are in service to an agenda to remake election laws around the country with the “For the People Act.”

We’ll come back to that. First, poor Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, believed the Left’s lies, leading to his awful decision to yank this summer’s All-Star Game from Atlanta as punishment for Georgia’s supposed “Jim Crow” election law.

To be clear, we’re not absolving Manfred of responsibility. Clearly, he succumbed to pressure out of ignorance, and his motives are profit-driven rather than based on integrity. If it were integrity, and if he truly believes Georgia is a racist backwater, he’d follow the advice of Senator Marco Rubio and withdraw his personal membership from the Augusta National Golf Club. And he’d demand that the Braves move out of Atlanta rather than forcing other MLB teams and all their black players to play 81 other games there this season. Don’t get us started on MLB’s efforts to expand in China.

But ultimate blame rests with President Joe “Unity” Biden and, to a lesser degree, Georgia’s perpetually aggrieved racial muckraker Stacey Abrams.

Since she lost the 2018 gubernatorial election to Brian Kemp, Abrams has been screaming about voter suppression and working to flood the state with more Democrat ballots. In 2020, it worked. She may have opposed this boycott, but she gave all the rationale for it.

As for Biden, despite his phony inaugural address about “unity” and despite winning Georgia thanks to Abrams’s work in the city of Atlanta and its surrounding counties (nearby Cobb County is where the Braves play), he has falsely slandered — repeatedly — the state’s recent election law as “Jim Crow,” sometimes throwing in the hyperbolic modifier “on steroids.”

Maybe given MLB’s history with steroids, that’s the real reason for the move. Okay, we kid.

As we noted Monday, of course, MLB’s decision really hurts minorities in Atlanta by removing perhaps $100 million in economic activity. And MLB’s choice of Denver as a replacement is ironic given that the Mile High City has a black population of less than 10%, while Atlanta’s is more than 50%. When you’re counting by race like Democrats do, those things should matter.

This is the damage that results when a president uses irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric, and the media goes along with it rather than challenging it.

Now Biden is desperately trying to get away from the tar baby he created. After all the “Jim Crow” lies, Biden said of a possible MLB move that he’d “strongly support” it. That gave Manfred the cover he thought he needed. Except now Biden insists that all the economic hurt it causes minorities in Atlanta wasn’t his fault.

The president “was not dictating what Major League Baseball should do,” claimed his mouthpiece, Jen Psaki. “He supports them being able to make the decision.” That’s a distinction without a difference given his bully pulpit.

As for still holding the upcoming Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Biden would only say, “I think that’s up to the Masters.” Even then he repeated the “Jim Crow” lie in applauding corporate economic sanctions: “It’s reassuring to see that for-profit operations and businesses are speaking up about how these new Jim Crow laws are just antithetical to who we are.”

He did at least acknowledge the damage to workers. “When they in fact move out of Georgia, people who need help most, people who are making hourly wages, sometimes get hurt the most,” he said. Yet he blamed Georgia, saying that the Peach State and any other states daring to move on election integrity need to “smarten up” and “stop it.”

Finally, back to the overarching strategy for Democrats. The whole reason they’re slandering election integrity as some sort of move back to “Jim Crow” is that they need a morally persuasive reason to revamp election laws nationwide, all with party-line votes in Congress. The House already passed HR 1, which would standardize shenanigans like bulk-mail balloting and ballot harvesting, all while eliminating voter ID requirements and other integrity measures. Fifty Republicans and the filibuster are all that stand in the way of the Senate passing its companion version, S 1.

Politically, the result of the “For the People Act” will be electing more Democrats. It also tramples federalism and any remaining trust in our elections. Yet if states enacting laws to ensure fair and honest elections — or, in Georgia’s case, slightly reining in pandemic expansions — is recast as the great racial crime of the 21st century, then any and all measures to counter it become justified. That, not one baseball game in July, is the endgame for Democrats.