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Dan Shaughnessy Won't Vote Curt Schilling into Hall of Fame Because of His Journalist Lynching Tweet

Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy is invoking the character clause against Curt Schilling because of his attack against journalists.

When we last left our good friend Curt Schilling, he was calling Joe Buck a liar and claiming that people would back him up to prove that he didn't conjure up some faux grit for the television cameras in the 2001 World Series. (Nobody has come forward to vouch for Schilling yet.)

Today, however, we come not to bury Red Light but to praise—well, not to praise him, really, but to point out that another fatuous Boston-based media gasbag should probably take a hard look in the mirror before taking a noble stand against Schilling's ignoble inanities.

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Enter Dan Shaughnessy, a man who used to hump the bloated dead voodoo corpse of Babe Ruth and, now that the sports fun times never end in Boston, treats readers to poetry like this:

"As the clocked ticked down toward 0:00, the sun broke through and a giant rainbow settled over the 49ers' massive new stadium. Such are the powers of Tommy Brady. He can avoid the rush, throw on the run, make the rain stop, and the sun shine…

"Tommy Brady finally played and won in San Francisco. He rained touchdown passes on the golden helmets of the team of his youth, and made a fine impression on the former fullback who signed his shoe when he was 12 years old.

"Homecoming King. A mid-November Super Bowl for the greatest quarterback of all time."

When it comes to baseball, Shaughnessy, a longtime Boston Globe scribe and BBWAA ballot-holder since 1987, has said that voting for Schilling to get into the Hall of Fame was a "tough one," but that he "held [his] nose" to vote for the "insufferable blowhard" because he "didn't want to let my personal feelings for a player get in the way (hello, Jim Rice)." On Tuesday, however, the Bard of Beantown reversed course and came out strong against the former Red Sox ace, declaring that he would not longer give Ol' Bloody (It Was Probably Blood, Right?) Sock a nod.

What did Curt do that finally crossed a line with the all-wise and powerful Dan Shaughnessy? The obvious guess would be Schilling's awful comparison on social media of Muslims to Nazis, the one that got him suspended from ESPN.

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Oh, what now? That wasn't it, Dan? Let that one slide, huh? Well, OK, maybe you didn't want to dogpile on Schilldog. Ah, it must have been the grotesque transphobic post he put up on Facebook with the brilliant insight that "the men's room was designed for the penis." That one was pretty bad considering that, according to one recent study, 30 percent of transgender youth have attempted suicide and nearly 42 percent have a history of self-injury.

Huh. Not that one either? It was enough to get Schilling fired from ESPN, but not enough for you to keep him out of Cooperstown, Shank? You set a high bar for low behavior.

OK, it had to be the combination of Schilling enlightening all of his followers with memes about the Confederate flag design being symbolically dipped in the Blood of Christ, while President Barack Obama's 2015 march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma was un-American, right?

Nope, the racism wasn't the root of the heart change, either? What exactly did flip the script, Dan?

"Count me out on Curt Schilling…. I shall invoke the "character" clause this year. Schill has transitioned from a mere nuisance to an actual menace to society. His tweet supporting the lynching of journalists was the last straw for this voter. Curt later claimed he was joking. Swell."

Oh. So this moronic T-shirt "joke" that Schilling retweeted is the straw that broke Shaughnessy's back. Evidently, of all the awful things that Schilling has shared and posted on social media, this is what hit closest to home. Nothing braver than taking a stand—if you can call not voting for a dude to get into some Moose Lodge with a bunch of bronze on the walls a "stand"—against professional slights.

After four years of eligibility, Schilling received 52.3 percent of votes for induction. Seventy-five percent is required.