NBA Drops A House on Donald Sterling

And Alan Keyes waits for the inevitable call...

From the New York Times:

N.B.A. Bars Clippers Owner Donald Sterling for Life

By LYNN ZINSER APRIL 29, 2014

Donald Sterling, the longtime owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, was barred from the N.B.A. for life and may be forced to sell the team for making racist remarks, the league commissioner, Adam Silver, announced Tuesday. Silver said that Sterling would be barred from any contact with his team and the league and that he would be fined $2.5 million, the maximum allowed by the league’s constitution.

“The views expressed by Mr. Sterling are deeply offensive and harmful,” the commissioner said. “We stand together in condemning Mr. Sterling’s views. They simply have no place in the N.B.A.”

The commissioner said Sterling, in an interview, had admitted to him that the racist remarks on a recording released last week by the website TMZ were his. He said he would “do everything in my power” to see that Sterling was forced to sell the Clippers. “I fully expect to get the support I need to remove him,” Silver said.
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Among the misbegotten freaks in the teeny, tiny, Black Conservative wing of the Conservative Movement, "Professional Apologist for Bigots" has become a very lucrative cottage industry.  I wonder who Donald Sterling will recruit as his Special Black Friend to help him rehab his reputation.  

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Conservative asylum, we find Andrew Sullivan deep inside his advanced True Conservatism Research Laboratory, bringing the most powerful tunneling electron microscope in Christendom online so that he can continue split hairs at a nearly subatomic level over whether or not it is OK to punish a public person for doing something really vile or bigoted by taking a bite out of that person's career.

So far, Mr. Sullivan has taken a Principled Conservative Stand on both sides of this issue so often it's a wonder he hasn't been called on it before now.

Oh.  Wait.  I forgot.  He has been called on it.  Repeatedly.  It simply has no effect on him.

According to the Last True Conservative:

...yes, of course, if an owner of a business makes baldly racist remarks urging public dissociation from an entire racial group, private sector sanctions – from the NBA or fans or sponsors – are “permissible.” They are always permissible in a free country. That’s why Brendan Eich is out of a job. [As to] whether what is permissible is proper or justified ... that will always depend on the specific case. I think it’s obviously appropriate in the Sterling case – because the remarks are horrifyingly racist. If Brendan Eich had made comments telling his friends to keep away from faggots, if he’d used any such terminology or had ever been shown to have discriminated against gays in the workplace or in his daily interactions, then his case would be very similar. But no such comments are in the public or private record, and there’s zero evidence that he ever acted in the workplace to harm gay employees...

Of course, Sterling did not tell his friends to stay away from blacks: he told his hooker that he didn't give a shit what she did with black men -- including sleeping with them -- as long she didn't bring them to "his" games or include them in her Instagram feed.  Also the NBA did not cite any evidence that Sterling "ever acted in the workplace to harm" anyone, nor did they cite any evidence of him discriminating against his black employees in the workplace or in his daily interactions.

They should have -- they should have canned the asshole years ago discriminating against his tenants -- but they didn't.  They fired his ass for saying horrid shit in secret.  And that horrid shit he thought no one would ever find out or care about was suddenly dragged into the spotlight and guess what?  They did care because it made their business look awful, so they fired him for it.  

So, actually a lot like Brendan Eich, but never let it be said that Mr. Sullivan has ever lets facts stand in the way of saddling up High Dudgeon and riding into the fray.

Honestly, Mr. Sullivan's narcissistic Pineapple Ice Cream Conservatism -- his drop-of-a-\\the-hat willingness to reverse-engineer-with-a-sledgehammer his "principles" to fit whatever whim he is enamored of on any given day and then re-reverse himself when the wind shifts -- is usually just funny. 

But some days, like today, it is positively Palinesque.