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Thursday, May 21, 2015

Darrell Revis and Jeb Bush: Profiles in Wretchedness

     Some may not like me lumping in sports and political commentary-perhaps sniffing that 'politics is not a game'-but

     1. I see nothing wrong with games

     2. If you read about politicians at all levels of power-particularly high levels-what you see is that they love sports analogies-especially football analogies. I mean the folks in the Oval Office, in the Pentagon, the Defense Department, the State Department, it is what it is.

     To me there's nothing wrong with this as football tells us a lot about the nature of human society and our mode of Heidegger's Being in the World.

    Maybe some don't like the football metaphor with its competitive connotations-they want to think that as a society we should cooperate more and compete less. I think it's a mistake to draw any artificial Chinese Wall between competition and cooperation-it seems to me that any society needs elements of both to function and ours certainly does.

    To understand society better, I'd argue that sociologists would stand a lot to learn if they open their minds to it. You might notice that lately I've been writing a lot about sports, whereas I had a phase where I wrote constantly about economics.

    What I'm finding is that now that I've digested a fair amount of knowledge of economic theory-certainly of the customs and prejudices of economists-sports is a great chance to use some applied knowledge. Ironically, as athletes are castigated for making so much money, the Marxist polarization of capital vs. labor can be seen in a much purer form in sports today than in most other industries.

    As counter intuitive as the man in the street-particularly the sports pundit in the street- may find it, you can make $20 million a year to hit a baseball or hit a football and feel 'exploited'-and I'm not at all clear that you'd be wrong.

    At present, baseball players are actually underpaid; the owners may have lost the 1994 strike and finally had to give up on their socialist paradise of a salary cap-but they found another door: revenue sharing and the luxury tax. The union let down it's guard not realizing that the luxury tax and revenue sharing is just the salary cap with another name-not quite as effective perhaps but, nevertheless,  Marvin Miller's baseball league has now lagged behind both football and basketball-even though both of those leagues have a salary cap.

   http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/04/why-baseball-players-are-actually-underpaid/255512/

   Ok regarding Revis and Bush: both strike me as utterly shameless. I see their recent comments as from the same cloth. First Revis is throwing his former Patriots team under the bus after just winning the Super Bowl with them. Turns out he knows for a fact they're cheaters-everyone knows that. Somehow that didn't stop him from signing with them last year. Is he a cheater too?

   "Darrelle Revis did not say anything too inflammatory when asked about the penalties given to his former team/teammates for Deflategate, but he did say that the penalties were deserved based on the New England Patriots’ history of cheating."
  “New England’s been doing stuff in the past and getting in trouble,” Revis told the New York Daily News’ Manish Mehta. “When stuff repeatedly happens, then that’s it. I don’t know what else to tell you. Stuff repeatedly happened through the years. You got SpyGate, you got this and that and everything else. Obviously in those situations in the past, they had the evidence. So they did what they needed to do.”
    http://larrybrownsports.com/football/darrelle-revis-patriots-history-of-cheating/262564
     Note that he's saying they deserve the penalty based on their history with Spygate: so if not for that, they wouldn't deserve it?
    Talk about new levels of being a mercenary! Look a lot of people feel it's his right to be a mercenary and I agree that as much as management seems to take a mercenary attitude towards the players, you can't fault him. 
    Still, it's one thing to be willing to play for the highest bidder, but do you have to throw your former team totally under the bus the moment you get someone else's money? I don't get that. So is he a cheater too as he was an integral part of last year's Super Bowl team? 
    I see it as an attempt to basically revise history-I mean hearing him you'd never guess he was in the Super Bowl back in January with these alleged cheaters-which brings us to Jeb Bush who is totally trying to revise history in an attempt to take a coherent position on the Iraq war. 
   "Jeb Bush is already testing out this new strategy. It’s hard to say whether it will work: While blaming Obama is a sure-fire winner among GOP primary voters, the middle of the country may still have firm memories of Iraq as Bush’s War. The strategy also risks putting more pressure on Republicans to detail what they would do in Iraq instead. Of course, with the situation in Iraq deteriorating, and with Obama’s numbers on foreign policy ailing, perhaps many Americans will be open to spreading the blame around."
    "The “knowing what you know now” question simplifies the genesis of the Iraq War by blaming it all on a supposed intelligence failure. That alone whitewashes away the fact that many critics warned at the time that the intelligence might not actually indicate what Bush and company claimed it did, and that Bush might be cherry-picking intel to help build the case for an invasion. Worse, as Peter Beinart and James Fallows explain, this narrative also obscures the fact that invading was a bad idea regardless of whether Saddam had WMDs — because it risked creating all kind of unintended consequences."
    "The simplistic line of questioning could help the new GOP rhetorical strategy. The story now becomes: Hey, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq based on what we know now, and it was a mistake, given the intelligence failure. But since we did, what really matters is how we prosecute the current conflict. This is now all about Obama’s strategy — Bush’s “mistake” is old news — and Obama’s weakness is really to blame for the current mess."
     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/05/21/morning-plum-the-new-gop-strategy-on-iraq-is-to-blame-obama/
     Greg Sargent seems to think that this will put the Democrats in a tricky position:
     "It will be on Democrats to prevent that from happening. But they might find themselves constrained in their ability to do that, since Clinton and Democrats, too, have an interest in keeping the questions safely confined to shallow “based on what you know now” waters."
      If this is true then what you're saying is that the Democrats will suffer more for many of them having voted for the war than Bush in pushing it with faulty intel that was the thinnest pretext. 
     Ok, so Hillary voted for it, but you can argue that tenor of the times made her feel that she had to support it and she and many Dems wrongly trusted Bush. They didn't have the facts in front of them but only what Bush gave them. I don't mean they deserve no criticism and Hillary admits that. But her history here is not equivalent with Bush's. 
    P.S. Jeb is trying another shameless argument in distancing himself from his brother-he thinks W spent too much money. 
    http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/jeb-bush-differences-economic-issues-george-w-bush-118179.html?hp=rc2_4
    More revisionist history. 

    
    

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