It’s been a slow week, especially in sports….
Don’t know much about soccer. Don’t care much about soccer. So let’s equate this to other sports- Let’s say there was a country (we’ll call it Canada) that was trying to play American football at the highest level, and in the space of a few days Canada’s best football team beat the New England Patriots by two TDs and then had a two-TD lead at halftime over the Pittsburgh Steelers before barely losing. Would anyone see this as anything other than a huge positive for Canadian football? Isn’t that essentially what the American soccer team did last week?
Nah. We choked, according to many in the media, including the normally sensible Michael Wilbon on “Pardon the Interruption,” who said choking is “defined as having a big lead and blowing it to a superior opponent,” suggesting the problem might be more Wilbon’s vocabulary than his judgment. Later this week, Wilbon and his PTI partner that day, Bob Ryan, predicted that there was no way the U.S. would win a major event like the Confederations Cup within the next 10 years.
Yes, it’s easier to beat a superior opponent in soccer than football, which may be a partial explanation of what the U.S. did last week, but is also a reason why it’s foolish to predict what Wilbon/Ryan did.
Don’t misunderstand. BPR is not rooting for (or against) the U.S. team, nor for the sport finally “taking off,” in America. This is entirely because of the pomposity of soccer lobbyists, exemplified by then-Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin in this senseless and snotty 2006 piece titled, “World’s right, we’re wrong,” in which Rushin contends that our apathy toward the World Cup, “illuminates many of our least flattering qualities as a nation.”
Good God.
Listen, people: Human tastes are of course a product not just of individual sensibility but environment, upbringing, cultural differences, etc, etc. Duh. I cannot imagine the arrogance it would take to tell someone they’re wrong to enjoy something, or wrong not to.
There has been a post-genius Joe Dumars sighting.
Hey, Mark Cuban: Wanna buy a baseball team?
I consider both ends of the political spectrum equally morally and intellectually bankrupt, fraudulent and full of crap, with one exception: The right feels it has to engage Archie Bunker to win elections. Hence Karl Rove, etc.
Consider these tweets (while also considering the unease your correspondent is braving to type the word “tweet”):
JUST HEARD OBAMA IS GOING TO IMPOSE A 40% TAX ON ASPIRIN BECAUSE IT’S WHITE AND IT WORKS.
and, referring to a gorilla escaping from a South Carolina zoo:
I’M SURE IT’S JUST ONE OF MICHELLE’S ANCESTORS—PROBABLY HARMLESS.
Oh, the side-holding mirth I’m sure you’re experiencing now. But consider that these gems did not come from just any jackass mouthing off on the WWW. The first came from one Mike Green, who works for a GOP consulting firm. The second is from Rusty DePass, a prominent South Carolina GOP activist. These are Republican-for-a-living jackasses mouthing off on the WWW.
People traffic in this kind of junk when they know they can not only get away with it, but profit from it. I’m sure somebody somewhere can come up with an isolated example in rebuttal, but in general there’s no left-wing equivalent to this.
Look at the treatment of the American flag in this photo. Now remove Sarah Palin from the picture and replace her with Barack or Michelle Obama, and consider the mouth-foaming spasms Sean Hannity would be having.
E-mail of the week:
Subject: of silence, sadness, and unspoken care: the man got killed in that down-train disaster
Body:
the just man kept his course along the man got killed in that down-train disaster but the prolific would cease to be prolific unless the of silence, sadness, and unspoken care:
Nothing to add, really.
