Timothy Birdnow

I know I'm beating this to death but it just bugs me how Conservatives climb on their high horses and insist we elevate the conversation with the Left when they have no interest in elevating it themselves - or even in following basic rules of conduct. They riot, they loot, they weaponize the law to put our people in jail, and yet we are supposed to turn the other cheek and let them do it. Mike Pence says so.

(Read my essay below this one for more.)

O.k. - Pence and the other "civility warriors" may not like warfare analogies so I'm going to try a sports metaphor.

Ice hockey is a sport that is very fast, very beautiful in many ways, and a bit dangerous. Now there are those who hate the hooliganism in hockey, who want to remove it from the sport. They find it distasteful because it sullies what they consider a majestic athletic event. So they want to clean it out.

Fine and dandy but this thinking never addresses WHY hockey is full of hooliganism, of dirty tactics and fighting and violence.

It's because, as a sport, it is too fast to regulate properly and there is ample opportunity to cheat in ways great and small.

There are teams that recruit tough guys, guys who will start fights and pull nasty stunts and intimidate the scorers on the other team by hitting them harder than necessary or pulling nasty stunts like slashing them with their sticks or turning their skate blades up to imperil the other players. There are all sorts of dirty tricks that can be employed in hockey and it will be by the unscrupulous coaches and players - especially in professional hockey where money is on the line

So you have a coach who is a Christian and wants to play an honest, clean game. What happens? He runs into a team like the old Blackhawks who will beat the hell out of his players, start fights, whack them around. His tea loses. And they lose pretty much every time they go up against anyone in the NHL because those teams had the good sense to recruit enforcers whose job is to keep the other side honest by using the very thug tactics the dirty team is using. It takes a thug to beat a thug. The other teams know that.

So this particular Christian hockey coach, after losing most of his first season and facing being fired, recruits a couple of enforcers of his own, policemen there to keep the other side honest.

Those enforcers sole job is to check hard and to fight the opposing team when they start abusing the players on his team.

Is that somehow unchristian? Mike Pence would refuse to hire an enforcer and would eventually get fired because his team keeps losing. He would tell his players to turn the other cheek, which would then be stove in by the other team's enforcer.

Eventually he'd get fired. Sound familiar? It's exactly what happened in politics - the Republican Party played by the rules and got their faces stove in and their leaders kept trying to play this clean, non-violent game. Eventually they got fired by management, who happened to be the American People - and a new coach named Donald Trump was hired, a guy willing to use enforcers to level the playing field. Pence, the holdover from the old coaching staff, keeps insisting they play by the old rules and lose "with honor" while Trump ejaculates "screw that!" Pence gets sacked and now he's going around demanding his former team go back to the loser's strategy.

The aggressors set the rules of engagement, and that is true in war, sports, and politics.

When the St. Louis Rams lost the Superbowl to the New England Patriots in the 2001-2 season it wasn't because they were outplayed; the Rams were the very best team in the League and could throw and run as they pleased. What happened were two things 1.the Pats stole the Rams' playbook and 2.the Pats used a "clutch and grab" strategy, openly and defiantly holding receivers, mugging fullback Marshall Falk, even when he didn't have the ball, and breaking the rules at every turn. The Rams didn't have any enforcers to retaliate and the officials weren't calling the penalties so they never could get their offensive game off the ground. In the end they lost and it launched the Patriot's dynasty and saw the Rams wither away before being moved back to L.A.

If the Rams had a few guys they could send out to retaliate the Pats probably would have had to ease off on some of the nastier things they were pulling in that game. It probably would have changed the dynamic and not only would the Rams have won but they would have gone on to create a dynasty while the Pats would have remained an "also ran".

You can't win if you don't take the field. Right now many Republicans are suited up but afraid of getting their uniforms dirty. They seem to want to play touch football against the NFL, who are playing by NFL rules.

Or they are playing Ice Capades in the NHL. Either sports analogy works. The fact is if you don't get in the game and play it the way the enemy is playing you will lose. And America is far too big a prize to lose.

Hide Comments | Add Comment