Don’t be a sore loser, don’t damage the game. This is the condescending advice given to President Donald Trump by Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell, who demands he accept defeat or find a new job.
Because the president is famous, “some people may really believe that you lost because of a conspiracy so perfect that it leaves no evidence,” Boswell writes, adding:
“In sports, and politics, only one thing is unthinkable, so destructive that it is a kind of ultimate vandalism toward the game or the country: to claim that you have been cheated, on a massive scale, out of victory without any solid evidence to prove it.”
Boswell (see photo) claims that people involved in sports and elections take great pains to prevent or expose cheating. Ever since the 1919 Chicago White Sox fixed the World Series, baseball has obsessed on preventing such scandals from happening again. A World Series and a presidential election “are similar – except in size and importance,” he says. Of the nearly 400 champions in Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA and NHL, only the 2017 Houston Astros were caught cheating.
The U.S. political system is dependent on “the credibility of the final score of its elections as sporting events are on the integrity of their final scores,” Boswell says. But there are “paralyzed people” who don’t trust their better judgment or rely on common sense and who question the outcome.
Guzzling the Democrats’ spiked fair election Kool-Aid, Boswell insists each generation improves the methods of monitoring cheating. Especially when it comes to preventing voter suppression and re-districting, oft-cited diversions used by the far Left party. He omitted dead voters and says it’s just about counting votes (rather than manufacturing and re-counting illegitimate ballots).
As a matter of Boswell’s checkered facts, America is “damn good” at preventing election cheating. Republican and Democrat election observers are allegedly making sure of that. Except for polling places in Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and other locations where irregularities have been reported, where GOP observers were out-numbered, harassed and removed. Hundreds of thousands of regular, decent people are maintaining the honesty of the process, if one doesn’t believe testimony to the contrary in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Arizona.
Boswell creates a straw man Super Bowl coach who loses and, for a month, makes conspiracy-ridden tirades about why his team didn’t lose by the clear margin shown on the scoreboard. He claims the referees were crooks, his players were drugged, the balls were slippery and other excuses. This coach demands replays and reviews.:
“His charges, based on nothing but his anger and dishonesty, are eventually so bizarre, so far outside what people in the game know could possibly happen, that even many of the coach’s closest allies, those in his own organization, concede they lost, that the final score of 306-232 was not just sort-of-accurate but precisely correct.
“ ‘Come on, Coach,” they say. ‘Don’t be a sore loser. Don’t damage the game. Because you’re famous, some people may really believe that you lost because of a conspiracy so perfect that it leaves no evidence.’ ”
Trump’s attack on the “game’s” integrity is undermining democracy itself, Boswell writes. Tobacco-spitting rednecks would think him crazier than a chicken with its head cut off, too.
Boswell isn’t the first sportswriter demanding Trump concede. Christine Brennan, of USA Today, asked golfing great Jack Nicklaus to pressure the president to do exactly that. Though Boswell talks of integrity, he’s being disingenuous. Sports cannot be compared to the 2020 presidential election … unless touchdowns count seven points for some teams and six points for others, or if home runs count 1.5 runs for some teams and 0.7 runs for others. Boswell is a Hall of Fame baseball writer, but politics and elections? Not so much.
