The list of ignominy is eye-poppingly long: Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds, David Justice, Miguel Tejada, Ken Caminiti, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet …
No, no, no. I’m not saying that the Bush administration had anything to do with the rampant abuse of steroids in Major League Baseball. That began well before Bush took office, back when he was a 1% investor in the Texas Rangers and the team’s designated glad-hander. What I am saying is that the culture that happily tolerated cheating in sports is part and parcel of the same culture that abetted the blatant chicanery that got us into Iraq.
This is a sports column, and I can appreciate that most sports fans prefer to take their sports neat. But the cultural hypocrisy generated by last week’s Mitchell Report is … well, I was going to say that it is hard to ignore, except that, as near as I can tell, nearly every sports columnist and cultural commentator has ignored the big picture. These people talk loftily about the great game’s loss of integrity. To make their sanctimonious point, some of these writers even quote President Bush, saying that steroids have, sadly, sullied the game.
Please.
First of all, let’s stop playing the innocent here. It’s not as if we haven’t known for nearly a decade that these guys were juiced to the gills. We knew, and nobody minded. Not their teammates, not their managers, definitely not the owners and baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, and for the most part, not us fans.
Second, a little perspective. As egregious as the abuse has been, let’s not forget: These guys are merely playing a game. Compared to, oh, I don’t know, unprovoked war, this isn’t life or death.
Third, I seemed to have missed something. When exactly did we become so principled? The news media is duly upset and offended that UT’s Roger Clemens was jacked-up on human-growth hormones, yet where was that dismay when the evidence came pouring in that the Bush administration had lied to our faces about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?
“There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged and to deal with it early on,” former Sen. George Mitchell said in his report – a pretty good description of the indifference to truth that got us into Iraq. In both cases, we knew what was going on. We just didn’t care enough to put a stop to it.
The cheaters in baseball and the liars in the Bush administration operated according to the same cynical philosophy: Get away with whatever you can, and when and if you finally get caught, you can rest assured that there will be no real price to pay. Sure, everyone will have figured out that you’re a fraud. In the meantime, you’ll have had your fun.
This article appears in December 21 • 2007.