People wonder why I'm not as much into sports as I used to be. We all know that ESPN, the biggest provider of sports talk, news and analysis, has been liberal since at least the turn of the century. But now the disease has wormed its way into the National Football League. Football is macho, right? With liberals constantly trying to debase it, citing brain injuries but simply wanting to tear down another American institution, it is rapidly becoming the mainstay of pansies.The league wants to crack down on the sport's best quarterback, the white Tom Brady, especially given that he's a friend of Donald Trump and keeps a "Make America Great Again" cap in his locker, over deflated footballs. The resulting "Deflategatge" was everything the investigation of Hillary Clinton should have been. I have not witnessed anything so egregiously dumb; you'd think the President had given the Islamofascist regime in Iran millions of dollars in ransom money ... oh, wait.
We were treated to detailed descriptions of the term "pounds per square inch," Brady's team, the Patriots, were going to be fined, Brady himself was to serve a four-game suspension. Who did Brady know and what did he get them to do for him? The investigation produced a 243-page tome called the Wells Report. Brady apparently ditched one of his phones during the investigation, which was a big deal, but not when Clinton's people do the same thing. (If you want to read more on how ridiculous the whole things was, and still is, read Dan Wetzel's excellent column which addresses the issue.)
The fey goon running the league, one Roger Goodell, has presided over a sport that has actively embraced every instance of (anti-)social activism. In July, Cleveland Browns running back Isaiah Crowell posted a graphic drawing of a black-robed figure wearing an American flag-patterned scarf slashing the jugular of a white police officer on Twitter, commenting, "They give polices [sic] all types of weapons and they continuously choose to kill us." Crowell apologized and that was that. How come Brady couldn't just apologize?
The NFL has kept players like Adrian Peterson who beat his son with a tree branch and used money from his own charity to fund a weekend of debauchery. For the child-beating, Peterson sat out one game. For the embezzlement, no action whatsoever was taken. Had Brady done this, Goodell would probably have had Gillette Stadium blown up. Former Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was suspended for two games for knocking his fiancée out cold in February 2014. Rice agreed to attend court-supervised counselling and charges against him were dropped. In 2015, Rice pursued wrongful dismissal charges against the Ravens, who had dropped him during his suspension, and it is understood that he received most of what he claimed during the settlement. In deciding Rice's punishment, Goodell said that he "didn't get it right". Oh well.
Yet when the Dallas Cowboys wanted to honor the dead Dallas police officers by putting decals that announced "Arm in Arm" on their helmets, the league ruled against them. Can't have any pro-police sentiment going on in the NFL!
"These [the police] are our friends and our loved ones … it hurts to not have the NFL fully support us," said Dallas Fallen Officer Foundation president Sgt. Demetrick Pennie.
But when a washed-up, second-string quarterback for the 49ers, Colin Kaepernick, decided to sit out the National Anthem during pre-season games, citing an oppressive America that does not fulfill its promise of equality for all as the reason, the league could not have been more supportive. It's all about freedom of speech and of expression. Somehow that didn't apply to Curt Schilling at ESPN. Funny how that works.
According to "Craperneck," earning $19 million a year is oppressive. However, there is no other country on Earth that would pay this talentless sack of garbage that kind of money for throwing a pigskin, and doing so with a rubber arm. Although there was an initial backlash against Kaepernick, he has since been lauded by the NAACP, sales of his jersey have skyrocketed and the 49ers have defended him. 49ers owner Jed York has matched Kaepernick's donation of $1 million to inner city charities. Let's be clear, 1 million to Kaepernick is chump change, the equivalent of me having 100 dollars and giving a buck to a Big Issue seller.
Players across the league have been supporting Kaepernick and plan to kneel during the National Anthem. The entire Seattle Seahawks team is contemplating such a "protest". These spoiled, bratty men, who are fit for absolutely no other purpose but catching a ball and running into each other, are ingrates and the fact that they want to do this around and on the fifteenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is beyond disgusting. I don't think any word in the English language is strong enough to convey just how insulting, degrading and selfish this is, so those words will have to do. The Kaepernick cancer is spreading and Roger Goodell continues to indulge those anti-police, anti-American demonstrators in his league.
I'm supposed to worry about brain damage in so-called professional football players? Their brains are already fucked up. What's a bit more damage going to do? Perhaps a good head injury will straighten them out, who knows?
Fifteen years ago, police were heroes and we were all Americans. Then, seven years after that horrible day, a demagogue named Barack Hussein Obama got elected as President and the country has been torn apart after eight years of his poisonous agenda which allows gullible fools operating on low-wattage minds to embrace a vicious fictional tale of oppression and privilege that even Dickens would have rejected.
Fifteen years ago, we cheered a true hero, a football player named Pat Tillman who gave up his linebacker position with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army Rangers in the wake of 9/11. Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in 2004. Now we laud punks like Colin Kaepernick who protest over nothing and sacrifice absolutely nothing in so doing.
Screw the NFL. I don't need its product, and I certainly don't need to listen to that stupid-ass Sunday Night Football opening song while the league rakes in the moolah from the dumb hicks on sofas nationwide who don't give a damn and continue to watch it. Not for me, thanks. I'm good.
Some liberal-minded observers and commentators have said that Kaepernick is following in the footsteps of the recently deceased Muhammad Ali. This falls flat on three counts:
1. Muhammad Ali became a member of the Nation of Islam at a time when civil rights were a legitimate concern. The NoI and the Black Panthers—who made their presence felt at the 1968 Summer Olympics—were angry reactions to indignities the black community suffered during that period: the lingering Jim Crow laws in the South and a lack of representation for their communities in the North. They were over-the-top, but they served a purpose at that point in history.
2. Ali sacrificed for his beliefs. He went to jail for refusing to serve in Vietnam. No matter what you may think about the whole "No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger" propaganda, Ali stood up and got counted for what he thought, proving he was a big man in more ways than one.
3. Ali was the best in his field. He thoroughly excelled at his sport. One thousand years from now, Ali will still be considered one of boxing's greatest fighters. None of this could be said about Kaepernick, his football skills, the agenda he is embracing nor the circumstances in which he is raising these issues. Black American citizens have the representation they had previously lacked. Not only the President, the Attorney General, the head of the DHS, but representatives, Congressmen, and local government officials across the country are black. David Clarke, the Sheriff of Milwaukee County, recent scene of race riots, is a black man. Police officers in cities have a significant number of black officers.
Kaepernick, his defenders and the whole Black Lives Matter (Only When White People Are Involved) are placing the struggles of the past into contemporary society, which cheapens the civil rights battles of the past. The issues of the 1960s are not the same as today. There has been progress, but "progressives" refuse to acknowledge it. It is inordinately sad. How can so many people be duped by naked, cynical divide-and-conquer tactics by a power-hungry political elite?
Speaking of Muhammad Ali, it is worth remembering that he eventually became humble. The formerly arrogant fighter started to admit that he was just a man. He became less of an activist and more of a humanitarian. During the late '70s, Ali announced that he would do good in the name of his religion and his beliefs. He was grateful for his white fans. Although a Democrat, Ali visited Reagan and "Dubya" Bush in the White House. In many ways, the man who passed away earlier this year had become the embodiment of what it means to be an American. Can any of this be predicted for the current crop of self-styled social justice warrior losers? I highly doubt it. Five years from now, no-one will remember
Perhaps if members of the black community embraced family life again—the family was once the staple and the strength of the African-American community before Big Daddy Government parked its malodorous ass there, shitting out welfare checks—and encouraged its young to stop idolizing criminals and thinking that being a rap star is the only legitimate way to be rich and black, then inner cities across the country would be reborn. Embrace education and knock it off with the racist "Oreo" and "Uncle Tom" comments that get directed at blacks who love to study, who stay out of trouble and who respect authority.
We hear so much about how the middle class has been pulverized from Right-leaning populists who mean it and the Left who treat the subject as just another talking-point, but only in rare cases does the dissolution of the black middle class get brought up. The day that blacks in America, as well as Hispanics and working-class whites, can have a tree in every yard and a picket fence surrounding their homes is the day that true parity in the land of the free will have been achieved. In the '70s and '80s, we were getting there, until the radical elements of the SDS and the Weather Underground became "academics" in the '90s and infiltrated the government.
We can get there again. We can stop the madness. Blacks and whites can look at each other as citizens, nothing more or less, again. It will take a sea-change of public opinion and policy. It can be done. And we don't have to wait until November.
Encourage sponsors to drop all malcontents, just as the Air Academy Federal Credit Union did with Kaerpernick copy-cat Brandon Marshall. Boycott the NFL and ESPN. Now.
