1) Tiger Woods’ apologists.
You know, I understand people have affairs. No big surprise there. What I don’t understand, though, is how so many people will actually make excuses for somebody when they get caught screwing around on their husband or wife, (or even give a kind of rah-rah, nudge-nudge-wink-wink to it, like it’s something to admire). I read where Clinton Portis came out and made comments to this effect, and shrugged it off like it wasn’t a big deal. Which kinda begs the question, “Uh, if he wanted to bang every blonde he found hot…why did he bother getting married in the first place? Why make the promise and take the vows if you don’t think they mean anything?
The other thing you have to wonder is, for the guys who think it’s all right or even seem to encourage it…what kind of respect do they have for their own wives if they think this is something to be proud of? I read where the president of Nike said this was no big deal, and it’d be a blip on the radar when Tiger Woods’ career is over. Well, perhaps. But…what kind of guy thinks fucking around on your wife is cool? What kind of guy says, basically, “Attaboy, Tiger, you go nail every broad you can.” Do these guys have the same attitude regarding their own marriages? I have to say, it wouldn’t surprise me. While I don’t know if Clinton Portis is married, given how many people have expressed this kind of sentiment, I have to wonder. Is this how *they* treat their wives? Screwing around on them behind their back whenever they travel on business the way Tiger did in Australia? Is that what his apologists are really doing? Commiserating because they’ve cheated on their wives? It’s the first thing I think of when I hear somebody applauding Woods, or suggesting “It’s no big deal.” Would these guys feel the same if they came home and found out their wives had been sleeping with a dozen different men while they were at work or out of town? Hmnnn…what do you think?
2) The effort to force Joe Lieberman’s wife out at the Susan G. Komen foundation.
Okay, I know FireDogLake is a liberal web site and Joe Lieberman (forced to run for reelection as an independent when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi tried to cast him aside because he disagreed with dems on war policy) is *not* exactly Mr. Popularity among his colleagues, despite the fact that he still caucuses with them. But the effort to gain celebrity support to oust his *wife* from her job as an ambassador and fundraiser for the Susan G. Komen foundation is simply reprehensible. Regardless of how Joe Lieberman was leaning on health care reform, his wife is involved in raising a *lot* of money and attention for a cause that nobody can denounce. Which makes you think doubly-hard about the head-scratch here. In order to try and ram through unpopular health care legislation, FireDogLake was endeavoring to *hurt* a foundation dedicated to finding a cure for breast cancer? Huh? Are you kidding? The more I think about it, reprehensible doesn’t begin to do it justice. Anybody who was involved in this cockamamie scheme should be ashamed of themselves, and people who don’t know about this story oughta go and check out the blog and the call-to-action. Then ask yourself, “Is this really a noble effort? To hurt the Susan G. Komen foundation in order to *try* to pressure a U.S. senator by attacking his wife? Seems rather cowardly to me, and I hope it appears even worse to anybody who’s benefited by the job the foundation has done over the years. If this is the first you’ve heard of this, you can find some more here, or simply google the topic and you’ll find plenty:
http://thehill.com/capital-living/in-the-know/72195-liebermans-wife-targeted-by-liberal-website
3) Jimmy Carter labeling Joe Wilson a racist.
An idiot? I’d be okay with that. Personally, I found it embarrassing when Joe Wilson opened his trap during President Obama’s speech and called out, “You lie!” regarding a point Obama was making about health care. But stupidity is one thing. Stupidity compounded by inaccuracy is worse, and Jimmy Carter labeling Wilson a racist because of health care? What the hell is Carter on? Is *every* freaking criticism of this president solely based on skin color? Can *nobody* challenge Obama on any policy issue, lest they be labeled a racist? Sorry, but the guy chose to run for the job, and that means you get all the heat that comes with being in the Oval Office. Racism doesn’t have anything to do with his agenda, particularly since the guy won a huge victory in the general election, and yet only about 32% of Americans support the health care reform the dems are pushing through congress with *zero* bipartisan support. Did all those pro-Obama voters become racists too, Jimmy, because they don’t share the president’s viewpoint? You’d think that simple truth might resonate with somebody who’s held the job (albeit ineptly), but I guess not.
4) The David Letterman joke about Sarah Palin’s daughter.
Even when he made the joke, I thought it was pretty dumb. His apology, trying to pin it on his writers, was transparent and lame. His second apology, in which he tried to further distance himself from it and backpedal just made it worse. But when it was revealed that Letterman himself had not one, but *numerous* out of wedlock affairs, while living with the woman he eventually married? Wow. Talk about hubris. He knew he was cheating all along, but yet he felt fine taking shots at a politician’s daughter for having…a child out of wedlock??? Gee, Dave, how long were you married when your child was born? Oh, that’s right…you weren’t, were you?
It was nice to see him get some payback for it when the scandal broke about how he was being extorted over the issue. Methinks he probably would have been amongst those detailed above (see No. 1) had the timing been different…
5) The 2009 Nobel Prize.
Okay, I know Obama’s beloved, everybody was behind him, all that jazz. But the nominations for the prize had to be turned in about two weeks after he took office. Can anybody tell me what Obama did in his first couple of weeks in office besides nominate several high-ranking democrats for cabinet posts that they had to turn down because financial scandals were discovered? Exactly *what* was done in those stunning first weeks in office that warranted his receiving the prize? Answer: Nothing. Proving yet again, that if Yasser Arafat could win one, the thing is absolutely meaningless.
6) “Going undefeated isn’t important.”
The Colts will be getting what they deserve this coming Sunday when they take on a NY Jets team that is absolutely on fire. If Peyton Manning winds up on his ass more than he has all season in this one game, it’ll be the Colts coaching staff and Bill Polian taking the heat, because they laid down and quit in Game 15 versus these same Jets, who were in jeopardy of not making the playoffs. And, despite what the Colts claim regarding that decision, none of their arguments hold water. If they wanted to rest their starters…then why did Manning start the game in the first place? The Colts had clinched everything possible even before the Jets game, so why did Peyton even take a snap? And, if the regular season winning streak meant so much, as Polian claimed a week later, why didn’t anybody…even the Colts players, know about it? Several were surprised to know the regular-season winning streak record was on the line when asked, which leads one to believe this was something that was thought up later to try and explain the willingness to quit playing and give a team a win. Not to mention, it looks bad that the Colts laid down against a team fighting for a playoff spot, because they appear to have helped keep Houston, who played the Colts tight twice, from getting into the postseason. Bottom-line? If the Colts don’t win the Super Bowl, the rest means nothing. The fans who paid a ton of money to watch their team go for perfection got screwed, and deserve refunds. Anything short of the Lombardi trophy, and people are gonna look back at *this* game against the Jets and say, “This screwed everything up.” And, what better motivator do the Jets and their No. 1 ranked defense need than to try and convince everybody they *can* beat the Colts, and the win in Game 15 wasn’t a fluke? The Colts may win, but they’re gonna have all they can handle on Sunday, and they’re getting precisely what they deserve.
7) The death of Chris Henry.
While it’s truly tragic a guy Chris Henry’s age wound up dead, at age 26, after falling out of the back of a pickup truck, there’s two head-scratchers here. The first is, the issue of Henry having turned his life around. I understand the guy had a lot of off-the-field problems in previous years. (Numerous arrests, suspensions, etc.) But, if you listen to his teammates in the wake of his death, all you heard was how Chris Henry had turned his life around. Uh…if you truly turned your life around, would you be standing in the back of a pickup truck being driven by your fiance, beating on the back window glass with your broken arm, without a shirt on, as she sped away from her *parents’* house in fear? Doesn’t sound to me like he’d *quite* turned the corner, given what’s been revealed from the investigation. The second thing is, the possibility he committed suicide. One neighbor apparently heard Henry threaten to kill himself by jumping out of the moving vehicle. Another witness said it looked like he did jump out. Several statements by the usual suspects (sources ‘close to the investigation’) apparently said that Henry was not thrown from the vehicle, but that he jumped out. Perhaps following through on his threat. And that’s head-scratcher number two. Henry had *three* kids. All very young. Was whatever happened between he and his fiancee *so* serious as to have forced him to abandon his children by committing suicide? Again, I know his teammates had nothing but positive things to say about Henry the person, and how he’d put his troubles behind him. Given what happened, though, I don’t find that terribly credible.
8) Janet Napolitano: “The system worked.”
As anybody who doesn’t live in a cave knows, on Christmas day, a passenger on an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight tried to blow the plane out of the sky, utilizing a relatively simple, yet sophisticated, bomb stashed in his underwear. The Nigerian man, who was on a terrorist watch-list, somehow managed to walk through airline security, and smuggle the explosives onto the plane. The reason for the bomb’s failure, according to investigators, was a technical malfunction. In other words, without the malfunction, we’d’ve had another airline-based act of terrorism committed on U.S. soil. According to Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano, however, “The system worked.”
Yep, you read that right. Napolitano believes despite the man being on a terrorist watch-list, and Despite his being screened at airport security multiple times, and despite his getting explosives onto the plane *and* managing to ignite the device, things went just peachy. I know it’s hard to believe, but even CNN reporter Candy Crowley seemed incredulous, asking Napolitano how that could be possible when, “the young Nigerian who has been charged with trying to set off the bomb was able to smuggle explosive liquid onto the jet?” Napolitano’s response? “We’re asking the same questions.”
There you have it, folks. Your security on a flight requires the system to work. And now we know, the system is predicated on explosives malfunctioning and terrorists blowing up only their genitals. That’s how the system works, according to the head of Homeland Security.
9) The Washington Redskins play-calling system.
They’ve fired Jim Zorn now, but if you follow football, perhaps nothing this season was so bizarre as the system installed by Dan Snyder in an attempt (allegedly) to jump-start the Redskins offense. The play-calling duties were stripped from Zorn, in what many believe was an attempt to force him to quit. Zorn’s favorite aspect of coaching the team was the play-calling. Rumored to be on the hot-seat since the preseason, taking the play-calling duties away was probably the single most effective thing Snyder could have done to force Zorn to quit (and thus, save Snyder the burden of having to pay off the rest of Zorn’s contract). But Zorn didn’t quit, and Sherman Lewis was recruited from a Bingo hall (where he’d been calling O-66 and B-9 since spending 5 post-retirement years away from the game). He would call the plays from up in the booth, down to the sidelines, to a secondary coordinator, who would *then* relay the plays in to quarterback Jason Campbell. But…Zorn still had input in the play-calling, especially on fourth down and punting-versus-field goal situations, etc. In a word: insanity. But then again, it’s Dan Snyder, and insanity doesn’t surprise Redskins fans much. Not any more.
10) The NY Mets signing Jason Bay.
If you’re a Mets fan, you have to wonder. If Jason Bay didn’t show much interest in playing for you when you first made him an offer comparable to the one he turned down from the much-better-equipped-to-contend Red Sox…why offer again? Why not go after players who *want* to play for you, instead of simply trying to lure somebody to take your cash? Unfortunately, while the signing of Bay is an upgrade, it comes with all the questions that haunt any big-money free agent signing. Is the guy going to earn his dough, or will he be content just showing up and collecting his paycheck? You look at JaBustus Russell in Oakland, and the situation just screams: “He got his money…and it’s all he cares about.” I won’t tag Bay with that just yet, but I do have to wonder about just what kind of player the Mets are getting, when Bay only seemed to warm to the idea of signing once the Red Sox picked up Mark Cameron to play in their outfield and Bay had no remaining suitors for his services. At least, not for $63 mil plus over four years…
