2010 in Review: Sports

The Chicago Cubs finished 16 games behind the Cincinnati Reds in the National League Central, in next-to-last place. Sigh. They were pretty awful. One hundred two years and counting. Some National League team from the west coast ended up winning the World Series. The American League continued to play some other game where the pitcher doesn’t bat. And yet another MLB star was outed as a user of performance enhancing drugs. On the brighter side, Major League Baseball survived another year with Bud Selig at the helm.

There are other, less important sports than baseball. Let’s see. WC will think of one in a moment. Oh, golf. In 2009 Tiger Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalante, his reputation, his integrity and possibly his marriage. In the words of The Capitol Steps, he couldn’t keep his bowsers truckled. In 2010, he did the same thing with his golf game. WC can be corrected on this (the subject isn’t baseball), but Woods, for the first time as a pro, went the year without winning a tournament.

American football, at all levels, was revealed to be a cumulative long term hazard to the health of the players. Repeated concussions, even symptom-free concussions, can cause very severe brain damage. Amazingly, this came as news to the National Football League.

The National Basketball Association playoffs once again lasted into mid-summer. Presumably, some folks watched to see who won. WC didn’t.

Apparently auto racing, and specifically NASCAR, remains the most popular sport in the U.S. WC has never understood sitting in stands for hours, damaging your hearing and watching internal combustion engines waste fuel. Is this a southern thing? Is it a white thing? WC doesn’t get it.

ESPN, the Eastern Sports Network, continues to believe there are no college football teams worth noticing west of the Rockies except Southern California. Despite a series of humiliations and five losses, post-season ineligibility and finishing tied for third in the Pac 10, USC remained the darling of ESPN. Five Pac 10 teams were ranked in the BCS. Seven teams are in post-season bowl games. Boise State finally lost a game and, in sharp contrast to other 10-1 teams, was relegated to something called the MAACO Bowl, administering an object lesson to Utah. Yet EPSN pretends the west doesn’t exist.

And despite the buckets of ink, petabytes of digital content and the passionate beliefs of a depressing high percentage of Americans, none of it really matters. It’s entertainment. Usually farcical. In the case of the Cubs, almost always farcical. But passion is unrelated to importance in the real world. Despite what Auburn fans may think.

Sarah Palin’s a Winner!

WC has been accused of always attacking Sarah Palin, and never offering praise. Well, WC is here to proudly announce that Alaska’s very own Caribou Barbie is the winner of Politifact’s inaugural Lie of the Year contest.  Let’s have a big round of well-deserved applause for The Quitter.

Her winning lie was the infamous “death panel” quote, a provision in a late draft of the health care reform legislation that only Sarah could find. While Politifact handed out a lot of its “Pants on Fire” awards for Big Lies, out of all of those lies told by all of those politicians, it was our Sarah’s that was selected as the biggest whopper of them all. She must be so proud!

She infamously said on her Facebook account,

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

As anyone who read the draft bill knows, there weren’t any “death panels” or bureaucrats making subjective judgment about who would live or die. What the bill did was was propose to allow Medicare to pay for counseling for patients who chose to get advice on end of life planning. Things like living wills, health care directives and palliative care in final illnesses. It was the benign, useful, helpful provision that Palin twisted beyond recognition.

The Quitter has shifted her ground since her award-winning fib. She says now that she is opposed to rationing health care. Never mind that she seems to be supporting U.S. Representative-elect Paul Ryan’s plans for rationing Medicare. Consistency has never been Sister Sarah’s strongpoint.

But Sarah, darling, answer me this: suppose there’s a medical procedure that will extend your loved one’s life for 30 days. The procedure will cost Medicare and the U.S. $10 million. Will you do the procedure? Or will you “ration” health care?

Doh. WC has gone and made you think. WC’s bad. And when you should be celebrating, too. Enjoy your moment of fame. Or at least infamy. After the party? Maybe you should reflect on the problem with big lies in public discourse: they don’t make the problem go away. They just make it that much harder to solve.