Baseball, the metaphor.

Watching the Dodgers/Red Sox final innings. It is amazing how a manager takes out a pitcher who is loose & dominating through almost 7 innings, Rich Hill of Dodgers, and brings in nervous reliever(s) who get shellacked. 4 run lead gone. Managers do it all the time, big mistake!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2018

ADDED: Based on the comments, not everyone sees what I think is the obvious metaphor. Trump is talking about himself. He's Rich Hill, in some kind of trouble, but it would be a big mistake if the manager — We, the People — were to take him out. We need to reelect him, because a "nervous reliever" — anyone else we might put in — will "get shellacked." It's just a baseball way to say stay the course or — the usual old-time-y metaphor — don't change horses in midstream.

What's the origin of the phrase 'Don't change horses in midstream'?

From an 1864 speech by Abraham Lincoln, in reply to Delegation from the National Union League who were urging him to be their presidential candidate. 'An old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams."

As for stay the course...

"[S]tay the course" allegedly originated as a nautical metaphor on maintaining a constant, unaltering course while navigating.... Citations from the late 19th century... show the phrase describing horses having the stamina to remain on the course of a racetrack...

The phrase gained a central place in rhetoric due to the publication by journalist Stewart Alsop in his 1973 memoirs of a conversation with Winston Churchill. Alsop related that the British Prime Minister had pondered at the close of World War II, "America, it is a great and strong country, like a workhorse pulling the rest of the world out of despond and despair. But will it stay the course?"....

"Stay the course" was later popularized by Ronald Reagan while campaigning for Republicans during the 1982 mid-term elections, arguing against changes in his economic policies.....

His Vice-President, George H.W. Bush, would later pick up the phrase as an argument for his election as President, both during the primaries and general campaign. His over-use of the phrase was parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Bill Clinton opposes impeachment efforts against Trump.

He was talking about the ouster of Al Franken from the Senate...

"I will be honest,” he said [in the interview with Judy Woodruff], “the Franken case, for me, was a difficult case, a hard case... There may be things I don’t know. But maybe I’m just an old-fashioned person, but it seemed to me that there were 29 women on ‘Saturday Night Live' that put out a statement for him, and that the first and most fantastic story was called, I believe, into question... Too late to wade into it now.... I mean, I think it’s a grievous thing to take away from the people a decision they have made, especially when there is an election coming up again... But it’s done now."

... but the implication is undeniable.

I laughed at the phrase "I will be honest" and went into my Bill Clinton impersonation, "But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again..." I love unbelievable intros to lying.

Also, "grievous" was a great word to nail the quote into memory. It would have been easy to say "terrible" or "awful" or even "dreadful." But "grievous"! There's a word. What are our associations with "grievous"?

I think of the great Marc Antony speech in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar":

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones,
So let it be with Caesar ... The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Caesar answered it...

And Winston Churchill's speech to the House of Commons in 1940:

“I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be..."

And — more evocative of the sufferings of Monica Lewinsky (and her privileged counterpart Hillary Clinton) — Nora in Ibsen's "Doll's House":

Nora: It's true Torvald. When I lived at home with Papa, he used to tell me his opinion about everything, and so I had the same opinion. If I thought differently, I had to hide it from him, or he wouldn't have liked it. He called me his little doll, and he used to play with me just as I played with my dolls. Then I came to live in your house -

Helmer: That's no way to talk about our marriage!

Nora [undisturbed]: I mean when I passed out of Papa's hands into yours. You arranged everything to suit your own tastes, and so I came to have the same tastes as yours.. or I pretended to. I'm not quite sure which.. perhaps it was a bit of both -- sometimes one and sometimes the other. Now that I come to look at it, I've lived here like a pauper -- simply from hand to mouth. I've lived by performing tricks for you, Torvald. That was how you wanted it. You and Papa have committed a grievous sin against me: it's your fault that I've made nothing of my life.

"Many academics branded Bush a failure long before his presidency ended...

"... and not just fringe elements of the academy, such as Ward Churchill or Howard Zinn, but also scholars from the nation’s most prestigious universities."

Writes Professor Stephen F. Knott, noting some choice examples, including:

Historian Douglas Brinkley, author of a flattering election-year biography of 2004 presidential nominee John Kerry, declared in 2006 that “it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder” and that Bush purposely tried to “brutalize his opponents.”

Handcuffed to the bottom rungs? What a crappy writer Brinkley is! Picture someone handcuffed to the bottom rungs. Feet go on the rungs of a ladder, and handcuffs go on wrists. Is Bush trying to climb a ladder in the handstand position? Apparently, these elite historians would like to require any advancement by Bush to be done at a severe disadvantage.

Stanley Fish on the Ward Churchill verdict.

"The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that fill its pages are the kind scholars regularly hurl at their polemical opponents. It’s part of the game. But in most cases, after you’ve trashed the guy’s work in a book or a review, you don’t get to fire him. Which is good, because if the standards for dismissal adopted by the Churchill committee were generally in force, hardly any of us professors would have jobs."

Ward Churchill wins his lawsuit against the University of Colorado.

Rightly so, I think:

The jurors found that Mr. Churchill’s political views had been a “substantial or motivating” factor in his dismissal, and that the university had not shown that he would have been dismissed anyway....

But if he won, why only $1 in damages?

"Oh, and one more thing: F--you."

In The Weekly Standard, Matt Labash has a long, colorful article about Ward Churchill, whom he followed about and had a long drunken conversation with. An excerpt:

That night, Churchill, his wife Natsu, and I meet up at the Hotel Durant bar, just off the Berkeley campus. ... [W]e tuck into a bay-windowed nook with a no smoking sticker displayed prominently. "I usually put that right over my ashtray," he rasps.

Seeing as how we're getting along so famously, I pop out my tape recorder and start with a softball. "Why do you hate America?" I ask him.

"Next question," he says. "Why do you beat your wife? When you answer that, I'll answer yours."

I go with a different approach, asking what Easter means to him. "Easter?" he says, as if he's just heard the word for the first time. "That's when that poor man was crucified. Is that after he'd been entombed, and they rolled the rock back, he ran out, saw his shadow and ran back in?"

I take the Punxsutawney Jesus crack to mean that Churchill is up for a good mud-wrestling match, so I order fire-waters all round (he's a Jameson's Irish Whiskey man), and we hunker down for a three-hour duel. ...

As the night wears on, I feel transported back to my college days, when, on any given evening, you could end up in an off-campus bar with some batty radical professor, drinking, arguing, and throwing darts--at each other. Churchill and I, in repeated cycles, suffer through the classic three stages of happy hour: boozy bonhomie, injurious repartee, then schmaltzy reconciliation.

We find common ground on a few things. We agree that singer Townes Van Zandt is God, or was, until he drank himself to death. We resolve that Paul Newman characters make for good children's names (Luke, Hud, etc.). We concur that one of the most satisfying lines in the English language (Churchill's favorite) comes from Dashiell Hammett in The Dain Curse, when he describes a woman's face as a "dusky oval mask between black hat and black fur coat."

We disagree on nearly everything else, sometimes violently. ...

We patch things up, for the most part. And by the end of the evening, I again posit to Churchill that he knows no transgression unless it's American transgression, that his calculus considers only the wars we've fought, but never the wars the world never had to fight as a result of American might. I tell him that communism, which set into motion so many of the American policies he detests, was no joke--it took the lives of 100 million people. At this, he blanches. "You don't really want to sit here and get into an arithmetical tally of who killed more people. Both have killed astronomical numbers of people in order to maintain themselves. Neither is defensible. The Soviet Union, however, has the virtue at this point of not being here anymore. The United States cannot claim that credit."

As I settle the check, and Churchill and his wife get up to leave, he says offhandedly, "Oh, and one more thing: F--you." I think he's joking, but in case he's not, on behalf of the little Eichmanns, I offer back with relish, "F--you too."

Great article. There's much more in it. You should read it.

The Ward Churchill controversy comes to Wisconsin.

Personally, I think Churchill is getting way too much attention. As my mother used to say: "You're only encouraging him." Anyway, the big brouhaha comes to Wisconsin -- as Churchill is scheduled to speak at the Whitewater campus on March 1st -- the Badger Herald reports. I like this quote from my colleague Gordon Baldwin:

“[Churchill’s] probably a jackass, but that doesn’t [matter],” Baldwin said. “If he is invited, he’s got a right to speak, but you don’t have a First Amendment right to be respected or to be agreed with.”

I know there's more to the controversy than Churchill's right to speak, but that's the University of Colorado's problem. There, I look askance at UC, not Churchill: Why did they hire and promote him?