Baseball held the line on Rupert Murdoch

This week, that gentlemanly, world father-figure statesman, Rupert Murdoch, bought ads in every newspaper in captivity to express his boundless grief, his ultimate sadness, that his reputation as the Grand Old Man of Journalism could have been soiled. O! damn those few disreptutable reporters - lowly scum! - who hacked into the phones of murder victims and rival politicos, who listened to their private messages, and even deleted them, so the VoiceMail memories would not fill up, denying the wretched creatures more personal information that could be used to harass or intimidate Murdoch's enemies -- without him knowing about it, of course.

So sad. So sad. But he has promised it shall never happen again. So sad...

For the last 20 years, whenever I saw Rupert Murdoch, one thought emerged:

There is no God.

Nope. None. Can't be. The most power media magnate in the world could not be this man. God would not let it happen.

Well, last week, it almost appeared as though the world finally figured out what this guy -- backrolled almost entirely by those lovers of free speech, the royal Saudi family -- did to journalism: He figured out a way to turn reporters into bullets and fire them at his enemies. He used newspapers like Gatlin guns, and when anyone got in his way, well, let's just say he had an army of scumbags with their own certain ways of learning secrets.

Until last week, Major League Baseball was the lone Waterloo in Rupert Murdoch's quest to buy the world. In 1998, he bought the Dodgers, then the gold standard of the National League. He paid $311 million, twice what MLB teams were said to be worth. Within three months, he fired the top brass. He went through three managers in six years, never reached the post-season, let attendance tumble, sold to Frank McCourt -- the current scumbag -- and in the name of Kevin Brown, the Dodgers have never been the same.

Baseball held the line.

Last week, we got to see another grand spectacle: The payroll toadies of Fox News were whining about the media "piling on" their beloved boss. These are the same people who signed call girl Ashley Dupree - the idiotic one-time former mistress to Elliot Spitzer - to become a regular news commentator.  These are the people who for two years routinely troweled up "experts" to question whether the President of the United States was a legal citizen. These are people who still refer to Rep. Anthony Weiner as "a rat." These are the people who never retract their mistakes, but just pretend nobody notices and go on to the next one.

Well, you can't kill the boogeyman. Watch Murdoch's apology be accepted. Write this down: In five years, he'll own that sky network that the Brits now deny him, because humans are unfailingly gullible, and his enemies will be wondering why their VoiceMail is acting strangely. Sorry, folks, but if this guy is our species most powerful voice... if in the end, savagery and evil always win, well, sorry, if I sound cynical...

But baseball held the line. He may have destroyed the Dodgers, but he couldn't ruin baseball.

So in moments of weakness, or anger, excuse me if I retreat there.

And in the meantime, let's demand that Murdoch can give back those Pulitzers.

Huh? O, sorry. He never won one.