I can't help it, but when I see Barry Bonds getting snubbed by Bud Selig, I see and hear Donald Rumsfeld raving against Hussein. Then I see this picture and see the hypocrisy and complicity of the Republicans in this nightmarish facade of lies and greed.
Just like Barry Bonds is getting denigrated by Official Major League Baseball, not Henry Aaron who is perfectly well within his rights to snub Bonds, but the greedy owners and their Executive Committee, you need to remember that once upon a time Bud Selig and company turned a blind eye to the destructive actions of some of their players, to save their precious toys and their even more precious investments.
Because it’s high time, too, for the suits running baseball to come forward and admit complicity in a scandal they did little to stop and everything to profit from.
Maybe Bud is doing it because George W Bush wants to get tough on steroids. Maybe because he doesn't like a cheater. Maybe because he has no way of reconciling his past actions with the present situation created by those actions. I think that's what they call cognitive dissonance.
I realize that the crimes aren't the same, baseball being a game slowly having the life squeezed out of it by people like Selig and Sandy Alderson and the Corporations and ESPN, while the lives being squeezed in Iraq are real, once living and breathing, now dead at the hands of George Bush and Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and all the rest of the enablers, Bremer and Kristol and Kagen and Limbaugh and Drudge and all the rest.
Yeah, Bonds cheated. But his bosses told him too, one way or another. He'll get the record, for how long is debatable, but at a personal cost way out of proportion to that deserved by his arrogant and sometimes churlish behavior. Ken Caminiti paid for it with his life, Manuel Noriega rots in a Miami prison, Iraq is ripped to shreds, it's all a matter of scale, but the motivations seem pretty much the same.
We're just tools to be used, abused, and tossed onto the garbage heap when they're through with us. Because they have the power.
We need to take that power away. Every way and every day.
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2 comments:
It is commonly held that good prosecutors can get a Grand Jury to indict a bologna sandwich. And yet three Grand Juries refused to indict Bonds in relation to the BALCO steroid scandal.
So perhaps the evidence is less than compelling and it remains to be proven whether or not Bonds used steroids. You may in fact already be convinced that he did, based on whatever incontrovertible evidence you've seen that was not available to the several Grand Juries.
Whether or not Bonds has a winning personality the endears him to millions is largely irrelevant. He was paid money to play a game and generate revenue for owners, the same as any working person. That he delivered the goods for his employers is undeniable.
Absolutely. But I still see Barry Bonds as a tragic figure. And I can't see him sitting there in the dugout and not believe that he's bulked up in an un-natural way. Hey, Tony Gwynn bulked up too, but I'm pretty sure it weren't steroids!
Whether he's guilty or not is also irrelevent. We know baseball went to steroids after the strike, too many people were hitting flyballs that shouldn't have even made it to the warning track, let alone the seats, to think otherwise.
What disturbs me is the callous disregard that the owners show for their employees and their long term health; their hypocrisy; and their absolute willingness to turn on people when they're done using them, or if they threaten their precious money.
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