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The Maloof family, majority owners of the NBA Sacramento Kings, are in final negotiations to sell the team to California investors after being denied permission to sell the team to Seattle investors, who would move it.  The same Seattle that lost its team the exact same way.

Meanwhile, plans for a publicly-financed new arena are moving along full-steam. The same arena the public denied the Maloofs.

If the Maloofs know their military history, they see a parable. They are the Claude Auchinleck of the NBA and they just got replaced by Bernard Montgomery.  You may not know any military history but Auchinleck was a well-liked British General, who fought in North Africa.  He had reasonable success but was stymied by one of the greatest generals on any side in the war: Erwin Rommel (Guderian would be in the running also).  Auchinleck reported to Churchill that they needed more time and more men to drive Rommel out of El Alamein. The allies had already beaten Rommel there once but Churchill had a vote of no-confidence looming, he didn’t need someone to tell him it would take two more months.  So he replaced Auchinleck, who believed attrition would solve the Rommel problem (German supply lines were greatly hindered), with Montgomery, who said all the right things and then asked for more time and equipment. The same thing Auchinleck just asked for.

But you can’t be a politician and fire another General, that looks like government incompetence. And Montgomery had those smart people at Bletchley Park, who provided Rommel’s battle plan. The stage was set and Montgomery knew he did not need to attack – the thing Churchill wanted and replaced his predecessor over not doing – he just waited to be attacked, which had to happen before Rommel ran out of supplies.  The thing that started the fight at Gettysburg in the American Civil War was that the south had no shoes and set out to get some. They were desperate. And Montgomery knew Rommel was desperate also.

Montgomery was so confident, due to knowing the battle plan and that the supply situation was desperate, he supposedly went back to sleep after an aide told him of the attack. Even after Rommel failed, Montgomery did not counter-attack. He was waiting on the ‘more men and equipment’ Churchill fired Auchinleck over – in this case 300 Sherman tanks from the USA. When Montgomery did attack, it failed and he blamed his chief of tanks.  But a few months later Rommel was broken in North Africa and after the war the Brits got a new Viscount Montgomery of Alamein and gave him a seat in the House of Lords.

Montgomery’s military career after the war was a disaster, they kept shuttling him from honorary post to honorary post to keep him away from the actual military. Meanwhile, Auchinleck was promoted to commander-in-chief of forces in India and got promoted to field marshall, the highest rank in the British Army. After the war, he was supreme commander in India and Pakistan as they prepared for independence.  Yet amateur historians of World War II only recall that Churchill replaced him with Montgomery.

In this political climate, even Montgomery could have won against the Maloofs.

So history is not going to remember that the Maloofs built a successful franchise from one that was terrible when they acquired it – the sale price is the highest in NBA history and they paid $156 million in 1998. $347.75 million in their pockets after 15 years is not too shabby.  History won’t remember that the same arena project the local government jammed through to keep the team in 2013 was put up for a public vote when the Maloofs tried.  A vote everyone knew would fail. But the new Generals in the NBA war have gotten $258 million in public funds somehow.

History is going to remember that it was a game of defense and attrition was going to be key; one last, desperate effort would make or break things. Like Rommel, the Maloofs lost but that doesn’t mean they didn’t know what they were doing. It just means politically desperate leaders sometimes go for different over better.

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It’s all very Watergate-y but unfortunately President Obama has been more like Nixon than Lyndon Johnson in his incompetence at it.  Nixon tried to use Johnson’s tactics but he got caught where Johnson did not, which makes him and Obama also-rans to the true master, the guy who got so many dead people to vote in Texas (a tactic duplicated in Daley’s Chicago of the day, so President Obama learned that history as well) he stole the election from Nixon in 1960.

The administration has broken all kinds of laws – even Tom Brokaw and Maureen Dowd have turned on him, and rightly so. There is optimism about his politics because it matches their own and then there is enabling corruption and they are not going to enable corruption.

One law he breaks that gets no attention at all regards Eagles, which are a vulnerable species and therefore killing them, even by accident, is a federal crime.

It’s not that the administration doesn’t care. They have been really good about prosecuting oil companies if a bird falls in a waste pit, or energy companies when they hit a power line.  They just don’t care if it’s one of his pet causes, like the wind energy sector that gets all that government money.  Not only has a wind company never been prosecuted, unlike successful energy sources, they don’t even bother to report the deaths.

When companies do voluntarily report deaths, Dina Cappiello at Associated Press writes, “the Obama administration in many cases refuses to make the information public, saying it belongs to the energy companies or that revealing it would expose trade secrets or implicate ongoing enforcement investigations.”

So if you also want to break the law – join a green energy company and get the White House to say any federal laws you break are private information the public has no need to know about.

Look for Dina to have her phone tapped as well. The administration doesn’t seem to like reporters at AP who do actual journalism.

Read another take, this one berating environmental groups for being bought off so easily, in Wind Power:1 – Eagles: 0