Hey Andrew, shove it!

He's talented, for sure, but Sully really crashed the plane this time. It's fine to rip someone who rips Michael Phelps. Insulting George Vecsey like that, though, no matter how wrongheaded the Timesman's take is on Phelps, is just plain ignorant. Vecsey is a giant of the business who covered labor and religion for the Times news side and wrote "Coal Miner's Daughter," for heaven's sake.
And I'd trade a dozen sports columnists and beat writers I know for the very serious political pundits who were wrong about Iraq:

Yes, the incompetence and arrogance were beyond anything I imagined...But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush's sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions.

It's pretty clear from his time in baseball that Bush was not competent as an owner; his teams didn't win, despite an early-and-often entry into the roid race. He was more than willing to tear up people's property deeds to get a new stadium through eminent domain. Several sportswriters wrote about this after conservative, small-government, property-rights-loving commentators like George Will and Andrew Sullivan failed to. So, really, spare us the insults.