In a statement he posted on Facebook, Thomas was plain about his decision. “I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.” Thomas has been tut-tutted by such political philosophers like Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, who on ESPN played establishmentarian court jesters, saying that when one has been invited by the President, one ought to go, out of respect for the office.

Nonsense. First, this has nothing to do with the country. President Obama is merely copying a move pioneered by John Lindsay, who in the midst of tight mayoral race in New York City in 1969, barged into the locker room of the World Series-winning Mets and inserted his head under waterfalls of champagne. (The ploy worked; he won a narrow plurality in a three-way race.) President Nixon soon began rewarding winning coaches with congratulatory phone calls. Now it’s receptions. Clearly these are held as publicity opportunities for the incumbent, and I have no problem with Tim Thomas or any of these other jocks exercising his right to absent himself. The White House is such a bubble, it’s good when this or any president hears some disagreement.

Indeed, I wish it was plainer why the 277 would-be honorees in Britain declined their invitations; no reasons were cited, and the Palace took care in its response to a BBC request to release only the names of people who are dead. Over the years, explanations have been provided by some people who are not on the list. According to the New York Times, the writer J. G. Ballard said he did not want to be named a Commander of the British Empire because the whole thing was a “preposterous charade.” The poet Benjamin Zephaniah (left) refused membership in the Order of the British Empire, saying “Stick it, Mr. Blair and Mrs. Queen.” David Bowie declined a C.B.E. in 2000, saying “I seriously don’t know what it’s for.” (Selling records, duh!) In 1992, Doris Lessing declined a knighthood, saying “Surely there is something unlikable about a person, when old, accepting honors from a institution she attacked when young?” But eight years later, she accepted another title, the Companion of Honor, saying she liked that “you’re not called anything” special.

And that’s the point–we don’t know if these folks were trying to raise an objection, or to avoid being used as a monarchical prop, or simply because they were holding out for a better honor. After all, Alfred Hitchcock turned down a C.B.E. in 1962, then later accepted being named a Knight Commander of the British Empire. But I like what Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent. Noting that the opt-outs “have little in common politically or personally beyond the fact that their work is the product of uncompromising individuality,” Blacker suggests that “Simply by accepting a bauble of thanks from the nation, they would be sacrificing what was best about them – their apartness. Once they became part of the national community, their voice, their eyes, their strength would be changed. They neither accepted the honour nor, in what has become a new form of boasting, told the world that they had rejected it.”

It’s a little cynical to say that this should be the guiding precept for whether or not America goes to war, but in my lifetime, the wars that have been most damaging to American interests are the wars we have not won. I do not believe that we should have gone to war in Iraq, but neither can I tell you that no good has come from it. But what seems indisputably clear is that everything bad that happened took place because we did not go in and win that war. Instead, we toppled the government, then tried to conduct a bargain-basement occupation while chaos reigned. When did good things begin to happen? Only when the surge secured a victory, and it is to the eternal shame of Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the rest of that claque that they so utterly failed to do that until months of disaster went by. We have now begun our tenth year of war in Afghanistan, and there is no end in sight, mostly because we do not know what the end looks like. We might have won the war when we overhrew the Taliban, but instead we switched over to Iraq, and failed to win the war. Now we do not know why we are there; we cannot say what we needs to be achieved before we can declare victory and come home. As a result, we are wasting blood and treasure, and President Obama should be embarrassed that he perpetuates the condition.

Lao Tzo is insightful, Clauswitz is shrewd, but no military thinker has ever bested Al Davis’ three little words.

Just win, baby. If you can’t, or won’t, then don’t.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it to Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, who captured the essence of the Rivera experience two years ago, as the Yankees were winning their most recent World Championship:

“There’s no stadium in baseball quite as relaxed and certain as Yankee Stadium in the ninth inning with a lead. Rivera has not been perfect in his remarkable 15-year career … but close enough. He has been so good that New York fans have grown almost unaffected by the tension and fear that is supposed to afflict the body in the ninth inning of a close game. With other closers — even the best closers — there’s a jolt of adrenaline that runs through the stadium. It’s like the beginning of a Springsteen concert. Here we go! This is going to be great! You rock!

“But with Rivera — even if he does enter to the strains of Metallica’s Enter Sandman — the feeling is different. It’s more like the feeling of a superhero arriving on the scene. `Thank God you’re here, Superman!’ In New York, the game is won when Rivera steps on the mound. The rest is performance.”

It’s always a privilege to see greatness, and it’s been a privilege to have been able to watch the great Rivera.

After lunch it was south on a very straight and boring I-75 (highlight: a huge billboard in a cornfield says Hell Is Real), through Cincinnati, and then onto Lexington. On Friday we moved Cara moved into her room, a process hectic enough to inspire a couple of stories that will be top of the line private stock family stories. After she settled in, we went back and spent the night in a very nice Hyatt. The next day, we visited Ashland, the home of the Great Compromiser Henry Clay, and then attended a couple of information sessions with Cara before sharing a pretty bland meal at an Italian restaurant (this is why Tony Soprano was neve drawn to the witness protection program), before taking our leave, and driving back up to Columbus, where we spent the night in an excellent Westin, of whose quality we were not worthy. (Top right, a new Wildcat in her lair; bottom right, Clay’s pile; Top left, Cincinnati, Thursday, 4:55 PM; bottom left, Columbus, Sunday, 8:30 AM.)

On Sunday, we drove from Columbus to Canton, which turns out to be far from everything, to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (If you wonder why the Hall of Fame is in Canton, it’s because football had it’s roots in Canton specifically and Ohio generally. But football soon left Canton for the bright lights of the big cities, and it’s no mystery why.) I liked the museum–it had some pretty cool Baltimore Colts stuff, including the Marching Band’s drum and Tom Matte‘s famous play-inscribed arm bands–but a lot of it was kind of static. They really could do a lot more. The best part was the collection of amazing films. And then it was eight hours back through Pennsylvania, and home. Happy to be back, but already missing Cara.

Joe Posnanski has a beautiful appreciation of Jeter that was published in si.com last week when Jeter was on the verge of his accomplishment. It is an excellent piece of writing–I encourage you to read the entire thing if you have an interest in this sort of thing. It is a piece worthy of its subject. Meanwhile, here are two selections:

“Jeter, more than anyone else, is the personification of 3,000 hits. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. How do you get to 3,000 hits? Line drive after bloop after scorcher down the line. Seven times Derek Jeter got 200 hits in a season. No other shortstop has done that more than four. Eleven times he hit .300 or better … that’s as often as Clemente. Jeter hit double-digit homers 15 times, most ever for a shortstop. Jeter stole double-digit bases 15 times, most ever for a shortstop (tied with Ozzie Smith and Luis Aparicio). Jeter scored 100 runs 13 times, most ever for a shortstop. He has been unrelenting and undeniable. We can’t remember all the hits. But we can remember that there have been almost 3,000 of them by now.” . . .

“Jeter burst into the league on the first Yankees team in almost 20 years to win a championship. He hit .314 and carried himself like a man who had done it all before, perhaps in another life. At 24, he led the league in runs and led the Yankees to 125 victories, the most any team has had from April through October. He should have been MVP. At 25, he was even better; he hit .349, scored and drove in 100. He should have been MVP again.

“From that point on, his career has been a cavalcade of numbers: .343 average, 124 runs, 34 steals, 44 doubles, 97 RBIs, 212 hits, 23 homers, all achieved in different seasons. He is unquestionably one of the greatest-hitting shortstops in baseball history. Jeter’s defense has been more scrutinized than the defense of any player ever, I imagine. There seems to be no consensus even now. Managers and coaches began voting him Gold Gloves after he turned 30, which was just about the time that people who try to quantify defense began to suggest that he was much less effective than he looked. But in the end, he was out there at shortstop every day, and the Yankees won every year, and for most people this tends to be where the argument stops. . . .He has done another remarkable thing, perhaps the most remarkable thing: He has carried himself with grace and humility in a time and place that pushes hard against grace and humility. Reporters and cameras have surrounded him for more than 15 years, yet he has rarely misstepped. Steroid suspicions have circled the locker of every star player, but even the most cynical tend to believe that Jeter has been clean. He has been the subject of the most extravagant praise imaginable (I invented the word “Jeterate” to describe the overzealous praise of his intangibles) and some withering criticisms, too, but he seems relatively untouched by both. I know a father who both (A) gravely dislikes Jeter as a player and (B) is thrilled that his son emulates Jeter. With Derek Jeter, that is no contradiction.”

First, let’s hear from Brooks. “You could easily get the impression that American politics are trundling along as usual. But this stability is misleading. The current arrangements are stagnant but also fragile. American politics is like a boxing match atop a platform. Once you’re on the platform, everything looks normal. But when you step back, you see that the beams and pillars supporting the platform are cracking and rotting. This cracking and rotting is originally caused by a series of structural problems that transcend any economic cycle: There are structural problems in the economy as growth slows and middle-class incomes stagnate. There are structural problems in the welfare state as baby boomers spend lavishly on themselves and impose horrendous costs on future generations. There are structural problems in energy markets as the rise of China and chronic instability in the Middle East leads to volatile gas prices. There are structural problems with immigration policy and tax policy and on and on. As these problems have gone unaddressed, Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system, which is the one resource the entire regime is predicated upon. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive.”

Clear enough, right? Now here comes Joe Posnanski, writing a piece that is complimentary to baseball commissioner Bud Selig. Posnanski says that recently he “wrote a little something about Bud Selig and how people cannot help but underestimate him. This has to do with Bud’s almost mythical ability to look baffled. Who can forget the Bud after the All-Star Game tie? Who can forget his rambling press conference when he held up the rule book after the rain-delayed World Series game? . . . .But Bud Selig has utterly transformed baseball. I’m not saying that he has always transformed it for the better. That’s a discussion for another time. But at the end of the day, baseball has been transformed — expansion, wild cards, interleague play, increased revenue sharing, drug testing, relative labor peace, new stadiums, All-Star games that determine homefield advantage, the World Baseball Classic, on and on. Maybe baseball stumbled into some of these things. Maybe it was pulled kicking and screaming. But this stuff happened. And Bud, unquestionably, was a force behind this stuff happening. He works the back rooms. He coaxes and ponders and considers. And sometimes he boldly acts. . . . Bud Selig might be the most influential baseball commissioner ever.”

Why are these stories connected? Because Posnanski is, in a way, illustrating the point Brooks is making. Selig, who is in charge of a pretty important American institution, is giving the American people what they want: leadership. “Not always for the better,” as Posnanski acknowldeges, but that’s not the point. People are smart enough to know that things don’t always work out as planned. But they do expect problems to be addressed. They do not want endless squabbling. They absolutely do not want endless partisanship. They want, as Franklin Roosevelt recognized, action: try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else. All across America, people make decisions. They figure stuff out and move forward. Our debt issue is a bad thing. If we face it, it’s a problem. If we don’t, it’s a crisis. We need to have the common sense of Bud Selig.