Baseball’s Opening Day; Richard Greene’s columns

Opening Day

Baseball is back and Opening Day at Globe Life Park was great!

Texas Rangers manager Jeff Banister’s never-quit approach is a positive example.

The new scoreboard in left field is great, and hearing the fans sing God Bless America without music was awesome.

The one negative is the new advertising on the foul poles. It’s a cheap, cheesy look and further obstructs the view of fans behind the poles.

Greene columns

I was astonished when I found that Richard Greene used the discredited reporting by former New York Times journalist Judith Miller in his March 27 column “vindicating” George W. Bush for his role in the Iraq war.

According to a 2004 article in New York magazine, during late 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller wrote a series of explosive stories about Saddam Hussein’s capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by Iraqi con man Ahmed Chalabi.

Almost all of it was stunningly inaccurate. Chalabi’s objective was to succeed Saddam.

Miller’s reporting was also influenced by Pentagon neocons led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose ill-conceived advice to President Bush led him to make the erroneous judgment that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The Times was forced to repudiate Miller’s reporting and end her tenure at the paper.

It might have been appropriate for Greene to provide this background. He did not do so.

In reference to Richard Greene’s Sunday column (“It’s wrong to set ‘a higher bar’ for prosecuting Hillary Clinton”): Clinton had no intent to harm the U.S. or profit from the way the emails were handled. That puts it on the level of overdue library books.

Greene ignored the candidates who want to discriminate against minorities, women and all religions except Christianity, build walls and carpet-bomb ISIS.

Enough on the emails. We’ve spent more time on them than on the assassination of a president.

This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 5:24 PM with the headline "Baseball’s Opening Day; Richard Greene’s columns."