Obama and the White Sox: This is over a month old, so perhaps I should have blogged about it earlier, but insofar as Reason Mag decided this morning to interupt its usual defense of white, pot-smoking, gun-packing militiamen with a repeat of this canard, I had to respond.



As you can tell from the interview, presented here in its entirety, Obama states that he became a White Sox fan when he moved to the South Side of Chicago (in the early 90's), and is then asked a question by Rob Dibble as to who his favorite White Sox player when he was growing up. He answers the question by stating that his favorite team when he was growing up in Hawaii was the Oakland A's. He doesn't hem, haw, stutter, come up with some bogus answer about how he loved all the Chisox who ever played going back to Dummy Hoy; he plainly says that he wasn't a fan of the Pale Hose back then, implicitly communicating the fact that he didn't have a favorite. And that was the complete interview.

Like the President, I also didn't have a favorite White Sox player growing up, but I was a baseball fan. Since we're contemporaries, I can safely say that the Sox during that period didn't really capture the public imagination. They never made the playoffs, and other than Dick Allen and Wilbur Wood, they didn't have anyone who would have been a household name to a typical baseball fan, much less someone living in Hawaii whose only exposure to baseball was the Saturday and Monday Games of the Week and the post-season. If Obama had told Dibble that his favorite player was Bill Melton or Stan Bahnsen, that would have been clear evidence that he was bs-ing. The answer he gave was the only correct one a true baseball fan could give.