Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, this will be a another rant about stupid government. And if you read closely, hopefully you’ll be tickled by my clever use of the word “tackle” in the title. :-)

A quick summary in case you weren’t paying attention to thePatriots cheating scandal and associated drama that’s sweeping through the NFL:

• In September, the Patriots were discovered breaking NFL rules regarding filming an opponents sideline during a game.
• Then, the league commissioner slapped the team and coach with one of the larger fines in league history.
• The Patriots responded with an insincere apology.
• The commissioner went on national TV basically accusing the team of dragging its feet in handing over evidence and threatening them with even more fines.
• A few days later, the NFL announced it had destroyed all evidence and refused to say what the evidence contained.

Basically since then, the league won’t answer anymore questions. It seems likely that the cheating was much worse than originally thought and the league decided that the PR cost of stonewalling is less than the PR cost of coming clean.

Which means to someone like me, I want to know what happened! Especially since I don’t like the Patriots due to their lack of sportsmanship. All season long they would run up the score after the game had been decided, by keeping their starters in and trying to get more and more points. It’s just shameful.

Anyway, back to the point of this post. Congress is now threatening to get involved similar to the Congressional Hearing about steroid use in baseball. And that raises the questions of “Why should Congress get involved?” and “Don’t they have anything better to do?”

Let’s start with “Don’t they have anything better to do?”. Well, yes. But politicians would rather do easy things that generate headlines than actual useful work like balance the budget or end the war. It’s sad, but true.

The next question, “Why should Congress get involved?”. I’m assuming that the justification is that NFL is a government created and allowed monopoly and is heavily subsidized (stadiums, broadcasts, etc). Even though strictly speaking no laws were broken, just NFL rules, the broadcast license stipulates that anything presented as live competition can’t have any “pre-arrangement” or “cheating”. In other words it can’t be fake.

And of course, the kicker, “Why is the federal government granting monopoly license to entertainment?” It’s not really sanctioned by the constitution unless you have a liberal reading of the interstate commerce clause. It probably comes down to the same reason a lot of things happen in the government, rich owners (team owners) needs something and the bribe Congress (”lobby”) to make it happen.

So sad. On the upside, maybe the investigation will show that the Patriots are really bad cheaters and they will “lose” some of their Super Bowl wins. Bad sportsmanship and cheating should never be rewarded.