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[Above, Paul Sullivan’s limp dick move:  blocking me from his Twitter feed.]

You know, I was having a great Sunday morning yesterday, esp after reading about a new medical study that “confounds science” and proves you can be both obese and healthy.  And, as the last day of regular season 2010 Cubs baseball, it was probably the most optimistic baseball moment I’d had since Opening Day.  I quit thinking about Wrigley in May or June.  When you start saying “next year” in May, by October, you get reflective, not reactionary.

Still, I could always count on The Trib’s Paul Sullivan to write something to make me shake my head.  That’s when I realized I hadn’t read a Sully tweet for some time.  What blew out my Sunday was looking @PWSullivan up on Twitter to find he had blocked me. Judging by the date on my last tweet to the great man (see below) it’s been about two months.  No wonder my acid reflux has been so good lately …

[The offending RT, the straw that broke the hump’s back.]

Blocked? Me?  What’d I say? What’d I do?  Well, a lot, actually.  It could be the times I accused Sully of out-and-out race-baiting here, here, and here.  It could be the times I accused him of distortion and rumor-mongering, creating news, and basically just making shit up.  It could be the time I made fun of Sully’s poetry as the ramblings of a stroke victim. It could be me calling him out on his gratuitous and relentless sandbagging of Milton Bradley and his role as a key instigator in the race-baiting that Sully himself worked so hard to keep alive.  Even after Bradley left, Sullivan kept at it, comparing the likable Marlon Byrd to Milton Bradley.  Why compare Byrd and Bradley? Because Byrd is black. It’s the same sort of fuckwit logic that had Sully implying that the evil Bradley had been traded for fan favorite, and white, Mark DeRosa. The “trade” never happened, they were separate deals that Sullivan links to stoke the fire.

Usually when sports reporters get raked over the coals it’s because the public recognizes they don’t know their sport.  Or, given the Bradley bonfire on which Sully kept throwing gasoline, there’s the temptation to label him a racist.

Sully knows baseball enough to keep his job and I have no idea what’s in his heart re race.  None. What I know is that he injects racism into everyone’s day, making all our lives just a little uglier for having an interest in baseball.  In today’s media world, hick Quran burners get weeks of network “news” coverage to inflate ratings.  A Don Imus gets a bigot pass from MSNBC until they have to cut him loose, but MSNBC still plays the race card to boost ratings by keeping creeps like Pat Buchanan and Al Sharpton around as “analysts.” Martin Peretz, Andrew Brietbart, Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and anti-ground zero “mosque” activists like Sarah Palin … Sullivan brings this same class act to the North Side as, of all things, a Cubs beat reporter.  Is he a racist?  Who cares?  What we know is that he has no problem at all using racism as entertainment.  That’s the product he brings to baseball in Chicago, the Friendly Confines, and you.

Not me, tho, he canceled my subscription. In the last tweet of his I commented on, he laughs off the idea that Chicago media has any impact on the city or the baseball he covers. To do so, he distorts a Jim Edmonds comment on Chicago media.  Certainly, I can’t imagine Sully arguing to his Trib bosses that he has no impact at all when asking for a raise.  Then again, I’m not surprised he disowns any personal sense of responsibility for the damage he does. The sporting press of Chicago agreed that Milton Bradley could not handle the racism of Wrigley’s bleachers.  Sullivan reported Bradley agrees with them here,  but with NO context at all that his own colleagues at the Trib said it first.  The result, Jim Hendry went off in defense of Cub fans, saying Bradley made it up“ as Sully reports here, again with no context for his own paper’s actions.  The Catch-22 result: haters get a pass with a Trib stamp on it.  But ask the actual ballplayers with no-trade clauses to Wrigley, and it’s fact.

Sully blocks me from reading his tweets, yet feels entitled to wander the Cub locker room dissembling and provoking stuff like this.  In covering Sully and co., I will always take pride in getting notice from Sports on My Mind. I take equal accomplishment in getting blocked by Sullivan.  “I don’t regret anything,” Bradley told Sullivan. “I regret there are idiots in the world. That’s what I regret.”

Co-signed, Milton, Co-signed.