Back in the day when I worked at my local newspaper, there was a particularly obnoxious reporter and, yes, he was and probably still is a liberal, who thought it was his right to be nasty to anyone he happened across.
I guess he’d gone though life never having stopped a fist with his face, until the night when he had a date with reality in that newsroom.
Sadly for him, he pushed the wrong guy too hard. I’m sorry I didn’t witness it firsthand, but I got the story from enough fellow journalists at the place who did see it to give the story credence.
Mr. Personality Reporter had given a particularly hard time to a copy editor. That editor, at the end of his shift, exited the building, walked down the street to a parking garage, climbed a few levels of steps and supposedly got to his car before deciding to go back and give Mr. Personality Reporter a strong dose of physical perspective.
Upon arriving back in the newsroom, Mr. Righteous Editor rained blows on Mr. Personality Reporter, who was quoted as observing pithily “I can’t believe this is happening!” as he turtled on the floor.
I cannot state this as fact, but I suspect bystanders felt the obligation to stop it, just not too quickly.
I can say I had similar emotions when, as part of my duty as a union chapel chairman I was in a meeting with a fellow sports writer and the editor of the newspaper.
My union brother had gotten the press started late due to an overwhelming load of local sports and a short-handed staffing situation. He insisted the overall editor had told him to run late if necessary, but get the results into the paper.
That editor maintained just the opposite – insisting he’d advised to be sure the press ran on time and leave news out if necessary.
So, as we sat in the editor’s office the next afternoon and this blatant disagreement over what had been said was put on the table, my guy jumped up, slammed both palms on the editor’s desk and said the editor was a liar, with a few colorful adjectives strung together before liar.
The editor – yes, another liberal – looked like he needed an underwear change. In the second or so this transpired I found myself doing some quick calculations.
If my guy went over the desk and grabbed the editor, I probably needed to attempt to intervene. But how quickly?
Fortunately for the editor, my fellow sports writer, and maybe even me, it didn’t get physical. My guy instead kept making things worse verbally. When told he’d be suspended for a week without pay, he screamed, “Make it two.”
These stories come to mind as we get pleas for civility from Joe Biden and his sycophants in the public and also the left-leaning media.
Of course it is Biden who on more than one occasion in recent years has said he’d liked to have taken Trump behind a high school gym and “beat the hell out of” him.
What are you doing tomorrow, Joe? I’d like to see how that would go.
More recently, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo went on radio to say if he wasn’t holding his post that allows him to be his state’s lockdown king “I would have decked him (Trump)” for perceived slights on the Cuomo family with stereotypical Italian slurs.
An Italian settling a verbal spat with violence is, of course, the stereotypical stuff of so many mob movies and television shows, Andrew.
So, Cuomo, resign your governor job for a day. You could win it back in a heartbeat in true blue New York. Go punch Trump instead of just making a show of talking about it.
Maybe you and Biden can share an Uber on the way to the brawl.
Something I’ve learned from growing up in various neighborhoods, some that weren’t the best then and have gone severely downhill since, is the person you need to worry about is the one who just walks up and punches you in the face. The people who flap their gums about what they’re going to do, seldom progress past the verbal stage.
When Biden muses that if he just was back in high school, or Cuomo says he would do it if only he weren’t the governor, those are just convenient conditionals for a couple of guys long on talk and short on action.
And there is a lot of that going around on the political left.
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