Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I’m starting to wonder if Gregg Easterbrook has lost his grip on reality, or if his habit of reusing clever puns and verbal constructions until they are no longer clever is now melding with a bizarre tendency to fixate on things that just aren't true. This has cropped up in his obsession with Senator Hillary Clinton's byline on books, and now it's cropping up again with respect to the Buffalo Bills' uniforms. I don't mind that he thinks they're ugly. While I like the home uniform, I don't care for the road version much. But Easterbrook keeps on insisting that the Bills have done away with red, white and blue. Funny, because the Bills' official team website says this about the new uniforms:

The traditional red, white and blue color scheme that has been part of the Bills look since 1962 remains but has been intensified with the addition of a darker blue. The team's red helmet with a blue charging buffalo on the side has also been maintained but has been modified to include nickel gray and navy stripes. In another nod to tradition, the nickel gray of the 1960-61 Bills returns as a subtle enhancement on the helmet as well as the jersey and pants.

Maybe Easterbrook is of the belief that "red, white and blue" only includes one specific shade of blue, but that seems like hair-splitting to me. They darkened the blue, but it's still noticeably blue. Their pants are still white. Red is still evident in their helmets, stripes on the pants, and the side-panel of the jerseys. I'm not sure which color Easterbrook is referring when he talks about "Rusting Russian Dreadnought color" or whatever; is that the gray that's only used as trim?

Time was when I really looked forward to Easterbrook's columns, but the guy is sinking, fast. Maybe a Russian dreadnought can pluck him from the sea before he drowns.

(And when he mentions red, white and blue as the "most successful color scheme in history", I wonder if he's including Britain and France.)

Kevin Drum also comments today on Easterbrook's tendency to ignore the obvious in favor of whatever point Easterbrook wishes to pound into the ground, this time in a case where Easterbrook sees "anti-Christian bias" in the news media that is actually much better explained from the simple standpoint of the ratings-game. That's an important point that gets lost a lot of the time: when "What is Christian" and "What sells" happen to not be the same thing (by whichever measure of "What is Christian"), it seems a bit disingenuous to conclude bias when the media or the market gravitates toward "What sells". This seems something that Gregg Easterbrook should know.

And finally, as long as I'm flogging Easterbrook, I might as well point out this whopper of a quote, when he compares Dennis Miller's stint on Monday Night Football to Rush Limbaugh's current appearances on NFL Countdown: "Note that their respective politics roughly cancel each other out, leaving a net of Pat Summerall." It certainly seems that Easterbrook hasn't been paying much attention to Miller lately…