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But precisely what Billy Dale's treatment by the Clintonistas has to do with Pete Rose's by Giamatti's successors (it wasn't, for one thing, Giamatti or his successors who got Pete Rose in trouble with the tax man, nor did Pete Rose's trouble with the tax man involve his gambling) escapes me for the moment...

The connection is that in your original piece you said that the people would condemn the government if it treated citizens the way that baseball treated Pete Rose. The fact is that the government has treated people much worse than baseball treated Mr. Rose, but the people never condemned the government and specifically Bill Clinton in any meaningful way. I should have written my post more carefully to express that I disagreed with your statement about the people's reaction to unjust government rather than suggesting that you failed to criticize Clinton. For that mistake, I apologize. My point was that "the people's" moral outrage over true injustices is not what it once was. I have mixed feelings about the Pete Rose situation, but even if I supported him completely, I wouldn't look to our current culture to care.

In any case, I thought the article was interesting and well-written overall. Again, it wasn't my intention to be insulting but only to point out how much that one statement struck me as overly optimistic about our society's ability to feel moral outrage over true injustice. Congrats on being able to maintain a career as a professional writer. I like to dabble, but I'll probably never quite make it.

WFTR
Bill

Again, it wasn't my intention to be insulting but only to point out how much that one statement struck me as overly optimistic about our society's ability to feel moral outrage over true injustice.

I probably had in mind those among us who do feel such outrage. I tend to believe there are more such than acknowledged, but that they don't all have outlets to enunciate their thought, whether as employed writers or a fellow like me trying to reconstitute his professional life. (I am not at present formally employed as a writer, though I have been a professional ever since the end of my Air Force days in 1987, and the one-man show Webzine where I published this thread's title essay originally this week is one I write and edit myself, on the ground that even if one is not being paid again to write, just yet, one must still keep the instrument in tune sharply. That and I, like George Will, wanted to be a baseball writer when I grew up.)