NO GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

So Bush isn't going to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener, for the second year in a row? That's what The Washington Post says, although the Post tiptoes around the glaringly obvious reason. (Go to any of the links here if you want to see what happened to Cheney last year when he went in Bush's place.)

I wonder if Chris Matthews will have anything to say about this, given how eager he was to gush in the days when Bush actively sought out photo ops of this kind:

Going back to 9/11, Matthews found himself blown away not by Bush's political or military response but by his ability to throw a baseball. He compared the man to--I kid you not--Ernest Hemingway. "There are some things you can't fake," he explained breathlessly. "Either you can throw a strike from sixty feet or you can't. Either you can rise to the occasion on the mound at Yankee Stadium with 56,000 people watching or you can't. On Tuesday night, George W. Bush hit the strike zone in the House that Ruth Built.... This is about knowing what to do at the moment you have to do it--and then doing it. It's about that 'grace under pressure' that Hemingway gave as his very definition of courage."

Oh, gag me. But we can't ignore this kind of nonsense, because far too many idiots think there's some correlation betweeen jockishness and being an effective political leader.

I think they're still selling souvenir photos of Bush on the mound at Yankee Stadium at the southwest entrance to Central Park, a few blocks from where I'm sitting now. (Selling them to the red-state tourists, that is -- no one who lives here ever wanted the damn things.)