It’s Monday, January 26th, 2015…but before we begin, a brief note from Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt on a story which shouldn’t be competing with this President’s continuing refusal to call Islamic terror by its proper name, but is:
Footballs. Footballs! Always Refer to Them as Footballs!
Okay, I admit it. I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to finding Tom Brady’s press conference yesterday hilarious with unintended double entendres.
|
|
But amidst all the chuckling, there’s a serious allegation here, some pretty compelling evidence, and a completely implausible explanation. As many asked, if New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick and quarterback Tom Brady really had nothing to do with deflating the balls outside the range permitted by the league . . . are we really to believe some equipment manager or ball boy or other team staffer decided, on his own, to meddle with the footballs without checking with the team’s star quarterback? What if Brady had had a terrible game? Wouldn’t he be furious that somebody had messed with his footballs?
“I would never do anything outside of the rules of play,” Brady said. But his own words told a different tale, and as soon as he was done talking, a 17-year veteran of the quarterback position, Mark Brunell, said on ESPN that he was among those who didn’t believe Brady. Earlier Thursday, even before Bill Belichick seemed to be throwing his franchise player under a triple-decker bus in his own news conference, Hall of Famer Troy Aikman said on a Dallas radio station the following:
“It’s obvious that Tom Brady had something to do with this.” . . .
Focus on the loosest brick in Brady’s version of events — or non-version of events — that took down the whole house. The quarterback said more than once that a ball at 12.5 psi felt like magic in his hands, and it made sense. Any elite craftsman or artist or athlete could tell you that the tools of his or her trade are not interchangeable parts. Right before a performance, Jimi Hendrix would’ve known if he’d been handed something other than his most reliable guitar. (Hendrix would have known if you handed him his most reliable guitar with different strings!!!)
But Brady claimed that the NFL game moves so fast, he doesn’t have time to worry about the weight or feel of the ball once the bodies start flying. “I get the snap,” he said, “I drop back, I throw the ball.”
You know who’s really hurt by this mess? Every player on the New England Patriots who doesn’t handle the ball on most plays. The offensive linemen, the defense, the special teams — all of those guys went out and played their hearts out and did their jobs, and now their victory appears tainted. (No, not “victory” as in just over the Indianapolis Colts; “victories”…as in everyone in which Belichick coached or Brady played!) They didn’t have any advantage from a deflated, easier-to-grip-and-catch ball.
The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy:
The most important thing — the Patriot legacy — is lost. The Patriots and their fans will never win the “best ever” argument. Everything is tainted. Footballs (reportedly) have been doctored, headlines have been written, and opinions have been formed.
Locally, the Patriots are revered. Nationally, they are loathed and branded as cheaters, and once again they have handed the hammer to their legion of enemies. (No, Brady and Belichick have.)
At this hour, even if the Patriots are cleared of wrongdoing, they are the modern-day sports equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Labor, Ray Donovan, who asked, “Where do I go to get my reputation back?’’ after he was declared not guilty in a corruption case.
Granted, it didn’t matter in Sunday’s game. But what about all the other games? If the Patriots are cheating, are they not cheating systematically?
Like Spygate, it’s not a one-game anecdote.
Did deflating footballs ever give the Patriots an illegal advantage in any of their close games? Did it help them win the division 11 times in 12 years? We know they don’t like to play on the road. In the playoffs. Ever. This great Patriot dynasty has not won a road playoff game in SEVEN YEARS.
|
This may also explain why a quarterback with a somewhat incosistent career in college has been so miraculously successful at the professional level. Occam’s Razor suggests the simplest answer is most often correct; so maybe the Wolverines simply refused to deflate his footballs for him.
Unfortunately for us as a country, in light of what it’s current occupant has turned into the Offal Office, the Pats are simply a microcosm of everything wrong…
…with America!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, courtesy of FOX News, Ralph Peters describes the not-so-subtle similarities between…
Letters from Hell!
“Pundits agonize over President Obama’s resistance to calling Islamist terror “Islamist terror.” How can he not see the obvious? How can he ignore the overwhelming and ever-increasing evidence? How can he insist that his subordinates continue their buffoonish insistence that Islamist terror has nothing to do with Islam and that they—secularized Christians and non-observant Jews—know Islam’s character better than Muslims themselves?
It’s easy. President Obama and his commissars fit the longstanding pattern of behavior (insistence, denial, castigation) that the hard left has embraced for generations. In the mid-20th century, leftists, bereft of God and desperate for a new faith, insisted for decade after decade that Comrade Stalin was a paragon of political virtues and that the Soviet Union was Utopia. All reports of purges, terror, man-made famines and the Gulag were fabrications of capitalists and their servants…”
In almost every aspect of its policies and politics, modern Liberalism is a religion, built not on a foundation of fact, but an unflagging faith in feelings. Think about it: environmentalism = Gaia worship; choice = worshipping a woman’s unfettered “right” to slaughter her unborn child; welfare & wealth redistribution = the adoration and advocacy of covetousness and envy…which, last time we read the Ten Commandments, remains a sin.
Since we’re on the subject of liars and cheaters, according to The Washington Free Beacon, at least one member of Team Tick-Tock is still willing to acknowledge what anyone with half a clue already knows to be true:
“…Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken acknowledged during a tense exchange with senators on Capitol Hill a deal being sought by the Obama administration that would constrain its nuclear breakout capability without eliminating its nuclear program.
Blinken also floated the possibility of extending nuclear talks past the June deadline should additional time be needed to finalize details of a possible deal with Iran…”
In a related item, the WSJ reports on…
Our Man in Damascus
And a complete and utterly incomprehensible failure at that!
Meanwhile, as FOX News details, the most destructively counter-productive foreign policy team in America’s history (Carter and his band of merry weed-smokers were inept, NOT traitors) has their panties in a wad over what most view as a well-deserved smack in The Obamao’s face:
“The Obama administration reportedly is fuming over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to address Congress in March regarding the Iranian threat, with one unnamed official telling an Israeli newspaper he will pay “a price” for the snub. House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu — and the Israeli leader accepted – without any involvement from the White House.
In public, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest politely describes this as a “departure” from protocol. He also says the president will not meet with Netanyahu when he visits in early March, but has attributed that decision only to a desire not to appear to be influencing Israel’s upcoming elections.
But in private, Obama’s team is livid with the Israeli leader, according to Haaretz. “We thought we’ve seen everything,” a source identified as a senior American official was quoted as saying. “But Bibi managed to surprise even us. There are things you simply don’t do…”
Funny; most Americans might…and likely would…say the same of The Dear Misleader’s entire tenure in office:
Here’s the juice: wethinks this Marxist…
…doth protest too much! He defines denigration, degradation and debasement, both of his office and his country…or perhaps more accurately, the country in which he is currently residing.
Next up, courtesy of NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson opines on…
“…I can recall meeting with a group of Libyan exiles living in the United States in 2006, all of whom were highly educated, Americanized professionals. They voiced optimism that their former tormentor Qaddafi was liberalizing their country and offering hope of recreating a civil society even for secularized dissidents like themselves. But when I mentioned the then-current case of the Islamic attacks against those associated with the caricatures of Mohammed in the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten, all four Libyans voiced unanimous approval of the violence against such blasphemers. And when I asked them about the then-recent suicide bombings in Israel, they again voiced support for such activities.
…While there is great talk in the West that it is only a small minority of Muslims who support Islamic terrorism, and that the remedy for such terrorism must be found within the world of Islam, there is not much logical or historical evidence that such truisms matter much. Ten percent is a tiny minority of any population. But if 10 percent of Muslims worldwide support ongoing terrorist movements, that is still 150 million Muslims, who comprise a large enough pool to aid and abet terrorism, either by giving moral and financial support or by acting as pressure groups within mostly autocratic political systems.
We should not be surprised at that fact. If just 10 percent of the French population is Muslim, and perhaps just 10 percent of that subset supports Islamic violence, there remains a pool nevertheless of perhaps 600,000 radicalized French residents of Middle Eastern descent that offers the sort of environment in the French suburban ghettos that spawns the current terrorist violence…”
Consider this: the population of Germany at the outbreak of WWII was approximately 70,000,000, while the membership of the Nazi Party totaled a mere 6,000,000. Thus, as TLJ so adroitly noted, a tiny minority of Germans, many of whom undoubtedly joined the party for personal advancement and security rather than ideological kinship, directly caused the deaths of over 60,000,000 people…and indirectly the demise of tens of millions more!
Does anyone else detect a disturbing parallel?!?
Speaking of disturbing parallels, courtesy of the WSJ, Holman Jenkins wonders…
May he quite literally, and deservedly, rot in Hell!!!
“…The lesson of Sheldon Silver is that this phenomenon has mostly to do with a self-interested machine protecting its own privileges.
Mr. Silver, as you may know, is the long-serving speaker of the New York state assembly, a man the New York Times calls the state’s “most powerful Democrat” and the capital’s “most powerful figure.” He was arrested Thursday for millions of dollars in graft. Two decades of his “service” is why upstate New York is America’s microcosm of France, a place of permanent stagnation. It can’t even avail itself of fracking, as Pennsylvania and Ohio have done, because fracking displeases the disconnected New York City liberals whom Mr. Silver must propitiate to keep himself in power decade after decade…”
It’s a sign of the complete moral bankruptcy of much of the country that anyone remains willing to be associated with the Dimocratic Party.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to the Environmental Moment, where we present for your perusal the perils of proposing projects with unprofitable proformas:
“The $2.6 billion Cape Wind project, a private operation benefiting from millions in federal subsidies, is attempting to pioneer offshore wind energy in pursuit of an eco-friendly, sustainable energy supply. Wind turbines would be installed off the coast of Massachusetts’ Cape Cod in Nantucket Sound. But Cape Wind is now in limbo after utility companies terminated huge purchase agreements. They pulled out after the project failed to meet two requirements by Dec. 31: to secure financing and begin construction. (In other words, total failure to perform!)
The wind farm was relying on NSTAR and National Grid to purchase a combined 77.5 percent of its offshore wind power. But Greg Sullivan, a former inspector general of Massachusetts who now works at the Pioneer Institute in Boston, said Cape Wind was struggling to find a buyer for the rest of the energy. “And because they couldn’t do that, they had to let the deadline slip with the utility companies. And they walked,” Sullivan said. “And I would be very doubtful they would come back.”
Doug Pizzi, spokesman for the Massachusetts League of Environmental Voters, said he is “very concerned” about the future of the project. “That’s certainly a setback for Cape Wind. It sounds like a major one,” he said. “But I don’t know if that kills the project or if that’s something they can overcome.”
Cape Wind argues the deadline to secure funding should be extended, saying the project was overwhelmed by lawsuits, wasting time needed to meet the requirements. Pizzi agreed. “If you have to fight something in court for ten years … it’s going to take a lot more time to break even and/or become profitable,” he said…”
Pizzi should know; after all, it’s Environazis like him who’ve caused the dramatic cost increases and construction delays the nuke power industry’s been enduring since its inception.
In a related item of rank Liberal hypocrisy, among the 1,700 private jets which flew to Davos, Switzerland, all the while filling the upper atmosphere with a toxic mix of greenhouse gasses was one belonging to…
Liberal hyocrite and former Dimocratic candidate for Congress Jeff Greene reinventing his life with Lindsay Lowlife.
An American billionaire who made his fortune betting against sub-prime mortgage securities has told Americans to ‘lower their expectations’. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Jeff Greene told Bloomberg that Americans needed to “reinvent their system of life”.
“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”
Greene owns Florida Sunshine Investments, which manages $2 billion in assets. He said he flew his wife, children and two nannies to the ultra-exclusive forum. Greene added that he is having dinner with Tony Blair tonight.
Which is why you can’t spell “Dimocratic hypocrite” without a D-O-U-C-H-E. Okay, we threw in the “Eeeuw”!
Lastly, on the Lighter Side…
Magoo
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.