Let The Charade Begin
"I'm Not Here To Talk About The Past" - Mark McGwire, on whether or not he used steroids.

Although loathe to comment on steroids in baseball because frankly, it's Spring Training and I'd rather comment on balls and strikes and the state of my Mets than wildly speculative and unprovable claims of steroid cheating in baseball when cheating in baseball has been around since the beginning of baseball, the blunt introduction of Congress into this mess makes it almost mandatory reading and thus, with the testimony of several of baseball's big names before a pile-on of self-serving egomaniacs calling themselves lawmakers who have somehow managed to wed their insatiable desire for publicity with their duty to their constituents, Sports Amnesia feels compelled to comment on yesterday's first round of hearings.

First of all, let's get to the bottom of why Congress is even wasting their time investigating this to begin with when we all know who the 545 People Responsible For All of America's Woes are. If anything, someone should start their own investigative committee on why Congress is so incompetent and how much money they'll accept to influence their vote. Apparently, baseball is behind on their payments.

The other rationale was this wheedling bombasticity that baseball sluggers taking steroids and hitting alot of homeruns is causing some sort of crisis in America's youth that the rest of society ills isn't.

Too add levity to the hearings, we get two sets of failed parents whose children committed suicide after using steroids and were ALSO amateur baseball players, blablaba - in case no one in Congress noticed, there are ALOT of teen suicides in America. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the third leading cause of death for those ages 15 to 24, surpassed only by car accidents and homicide. Will they be holding Congressional hearings to get at the root cause of all of them? And will that be after or before they investigate the causes of teen deaths via car accidents and homicides?

And let's put this in yet another perspective. There's endemic drug and alchohol abuse in Congress as well as other professions where "kids" look up to their "heroes", like musicians, artists and actors. Is Hollywood next? Then rock and roll? Where does it end? Why isn't current California Governor and the former Counselor for Fitness under President Bush the First, Arnold Schwarzenegger, being hauled in for questioning about steroid use by the heroes of America's kids? Surely all that bodybuilding wasn't merely the cause and effect of lifting a few weights here and there. Is he not being questioned simply because it isn't baseball? Simply because it isn't topical? Simply because the entire concept is idiotic and entirely inappropriate for Congressman to be holding public hearings over in the first place?

As usual, Congress is peddling it's own particularly repulsive brand of hypocrisy.

Now we can move on to a few highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspective), of America's ponderous Congressmen employing their liberal use of causational logic on the American people:

Rep. Mark Souder, who, as Chairman of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources responsible for authorizing legislation for the Office of National Drug Control Policy, is one of the few who might actually have a legitimate reason for investigating baseball, in a fit of hyperbole, draws an analogy between McGwire and Enron, of all things, when McGwire continues to assert that he doesn't want to talk about the past:

"There's a simple way to solve this," Souder preached, "(by saying),'I am clean.' … The American people can figure out who's willing to say that and who isn't. If the Enron people came in and said, 'I don't want to talk about the past, you think we'd let them say that?"

Witchhunt status confirmed. How, even in this great cynosure of jackasses disguised as a Congressional Hearing, is Mark McGwire on par with the pusillanimous thieves and life destroyers of Enron?

Souder, who was a member of the House Government Reform Committee investigating the Enron collapse, should know better. Leave your sanctimonious hyperbole at the door there, mate.

At least one of the glammer boys "getting at the truth" was a Hall of Fame baseball player in the form of Rep. Jim Bunning, who complained:

"Mr. Chairman, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I remembered that players didn't get any better as they got older," Bunning said. "We all got worse. When I played with Henry Aaron and Willie Mays and Ted Williams, they didn't put on 40 pounds and bulk up in their careers, and they didn't hit more home runs in their late 30s than they did in their late 20s. What is happening in baseball now isn't natural and it isn't right."

Hmmm. Maybe I'm old fashioned Mr Bunning, but how OLD are you? 74 years old? My god! Why I remember in 1900, the life expectancy of an American was only 48! What are you still doing alive, almost twice the age of life expectancy of 1900?! I'll tell you, Bunning. It isn't natural and it isn't right.

This from the mouth of a Republican from Kentucky. How long would we have to let him prattle on before he began to wax poetic on Creationsim?

Gimme a break. Bunning suffers from the same thing all athletes, musicians and actors suffer from when they get on their political soapboxes: they think we care about their opinions simply because we enjoy their talents in some other field.

Here's a clue for the Hollywood actors, the Jim Bunnings, and the politically inclined musicians of the world: we didn't listen to your music, watch your movies or appreciate your exploits on the athletic field because of your politics, and frankly, it's just best you keep them to yourself. Curt Schilling could take a massive page from this book as well.

Perhaps the only understated, honest view on the entire proceedings was made by Rep. Bernard Sanders of Vermont who noted:

""Let me just say this: I think people are saying, obviously we all know people with money are treated differently. There are God knows how many people rotting in jails. What people in America want to know is that people who are committing the same crimes are treated the same. And that is not the case.

"I would hope that the union and management would substantially raise the standards to tell people who are making millions and millions of dollars, if they want to make that sort of money, they have to not do drugs. Period."

Hahaha. Can you imagine if people who have money were treated the same as people who didn't? What kind of fantasy land is Rep Sanders living in? What's in the maple syrup in Vermont? I think he should have been drug tested immediately, made to piss in a cup and prove his innocence.

Let's face another boring fact: if it weren't for Jose Canseco's outrageous book, which he took plenty of opportunities to hawk yesterday, this little charade wouldn't even be on. Baseball has ignored this problem for at least a decade and so has Congress and it would have all gone down that same road of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil, were it not for the sensationalised version of Jose Canseco's book.

As he has already confessed not only to his use of steroids, but proudly confessed to introducing other baseball players to it, the epicentre of this steroid problem should be focused on him and him alone. If there are Justice Department proceedings against Giambi and others, so be it but for now, the only idiot with a mouth big enough to admit publically and proudly that he used steroids and aided and abetted others in the use of it, is Jose Canseco. Let him take the fall and let baseball and Congress return to their halcyon days of ignorance and bliss.

About the only productive aspect of these hearings was the chance to see and hear the Grand Master Idiot of Baseball himself, Bud Selig, wriggle on a hook for his inability to do anything productive about baseball's ills.

Minnesota Rep. Gutknecht, very simply, asks the question that is probably most on the minds of baseball fans:

"Mr. Selig, if you had credible evidence that records have been set by people who used illegal chemicals, what would you do?"

Selig, after being asked for the fifth time in the session to speak closer to the microphone, answers in the same wishywashy Midwestern used car salesman logic he is so widely hated for:

"If I had credible evidence, I'd do something about it. There's no question there's a problem. And we need to do something about it."

The Commissioner of Baseball's hands are tied. He couldn't effect a valid steroid policy because of the player's union and he can't do anything substantive about baseball records broken by steroid use because there's no way to prove any of it.

Hell, he can't sell the Washington Nats to an owner that isn't baseball!

So let's not hold our collective breath. Something should be done about steroids in baseball, blablabla. There's alot of injustices in the world. Is this really where Congress should begin?