Can't anybody here govern this game?
Posted: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 7:16 PM
Every time Congress holds one of its hearings for its members can show constituents that they’re right on top of the major issues of the day, I’m always left with one unanswered question: How do these people get elected?
That feeling surfaced a lot on Tuesday while watching George Mitchell, Bud Selig and Don Fehr jump through hoops for a subcommittee that has taken it upon itself to show the nation just how tough it is on performance-enhancing drugs.
I’m not saying there aren’t any people in Congress who couldn’t run a category in “Jeopardy!” (“I’ll take ‘Deficit Spending’ for $200 billion, Alex.”) But there’s way too many of them who wouldn’t make it three blocks on “Cash Cab.” Unless they were riding with Selig, in which case they wouldn’t make it a block. (Donald Fehr, on the other hand, would catch the cab in Times Square and be riding through the suburbs of Chicago before he had to use his first shout out.)
I don’t actually expect members of Congress to be up on every detail of every little thing. I gave up on that a long time ago. But it would be nice if these people would have the intelligence to hire staff who could at least give them phonetic spellings on the names that they’re going to throw out.
That way, we wouldn’t have to listen to Cong. Chris Shays, R-Conn., call Rafael Palmiero “Mr. Pal-meer-ay.” And Cong. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., wouldn’t keep pronouncing San Francisco Giants general manager Brian Sabean’s name as if he were a legume.
I’d also appreciate it if one of these elected officials could ask a simple question without preceding it with a speech that includes 17 calls to protect our children. I’ve spent a lot of time covering government and politics, and I’ve never seen a law passed whose stated purpose wasn’t to protect the children. That’s the reason we no longer have a functioning Fourth Amendment – to protect our children.
But I digress.
I’d like to say that something was accomplished in 4½ hours of theatrics and posturing. True, a few things were discussed that needed to be brought up. But this wasn’t about ridding sports of steroids, and it sure wasn’t about those ubiquitous children. If anyone actually cared about them, Congress and baseball and everyone else who talks about the need to save us from this scourge would be paying to test high school athletes for drugs. Everybody said that’s where it starts – in high school – but no one wants to actually do anything that might address the problem.
Instead, they’ll keep addressing the television cameras, building up points in the home district for their dedication to making our world safer for democracy. And we’ll keep getting speeches like that delivered by Rep. McCollum, who accused baseball and the players association of engaging in a criminal conspiracy that “defrauded millions of fans of billions of dollars.”
That’s not how it works. Baseball put on a show and the fans bought it. And the more revelations we’ve had about performance-enhancing drugs, the more fans there’ve been. Seems that even when they knew what was going on, they kept buying the product.
I will give McCollum credit for the best line of the day, when she argued that baseball is somehow different from other forms of entertainment. If baseball were the same as the movies and music industries, she said, “then there would be no difference between Barry Bonds and Britney Spears.”
Even there she’s wrong. No matter what the rules of the business, Britney would still be a better role model.
