One More Chance

I am a pro football fan. I love the Dallas Cowboys in specific. My love of the Cowboys goes beyond their 1990’s success or their success as of late. It’s my favorite team and will be for life. Why am I writing about a football team that was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by a divisional rival in March? Because the Cowboys (and to a less successful degree, the Raiders) are the team of the second chance.

A few days ago, talk has surfaced that the Cowboys may acquire the talents of the currently suspended Titan’s cornerback, Adam “Pacman” Jones. Jones has been arrested six times for incidences all seeming to involve strip clubs. He has been suspended since April of 2007 for his many arrests. But that won’t scare away Jerry Jones. Jones signed Terrell Owens, a player characterized by his awful attitude and his past choices to throw team mates under the bus, calling Jeff Garcia gay and blaming Donovan McNabb for the Eagles failure to win the Super Bowl. Jones also hired the formerly suspended Tank Johnson who was suspended for being sentence to a s four month stint in jail for violating parole, which was cut to two months because of good behavior. Jones believes that his program and the player’s natural desire to compete will lead them from their off the field troubles.

The NFL holds player conduct (off and on) the field in almost the same value as athletic ability and game intelligence. Michael Vick is a testament to that. My real gripe with the NFL is that this standard doesn’t seem to apply to coaches. 12% of Patriots head coach Bill Belichick’s salary ($500,000 of 4.2 million) was taken away for being caught video taping the Jets’ defensive signals. There have been many reports that this problem has been going on in the NFL for years and with the Patriots just as long. Then there’s Andy Reid. Last year, two of the Eagles coach’s sons were sent to prison, one for a pointing a gun in the face of another driver and the other for a heroine induced car accident that left one driver injured. The judge called the Reid household a “drug emporium.” Garret Reid told a probation officer that he liked being the rich kid that sold drugs to the poor. 89 pills were found in his jail cell. If I am understanding this correctly, a player is implicated in dog fighting and is jailed and indefinitely suspended from the NFL, but a coach allows his children to live in his house so recklessly that one puts a gun in a driver’s face and the other injures another person in a heroine induced car crash and states that he liked selling drugs (poison) to the poor (people) and said coach is made gets no conduct penalty.

I know the immediate reaction is to say that the bad acts were done by his kids and not him, but that is doesn’t fly when your kids are obviously doing drugs and storing weapons in your house. Moreover, when the league suspended Vick indefinitely, the only hard fact against Vick was that dog fighting occurred at a house that he owns but is not his actual residence. The facts about Vick’s involvement in the dog fighting were not known he was given his suspension. For all the NFL knew, he and Reid committed the same act; facilitating a crime. Do I expect him to turn his drug dealing children in to the DEA? Not at all, but I do expect the league to maintain the same zero tolerance policy for players and coaches. If Terrell Owens is fined $7,500 for using the football in an end zone celebration, shouldn’t there be something done to a coach whose house held what a judge called a drug emporium along with plenty of illegal guns? Call me crazy, but this smells a lot like a double standard.

As the leader of a team, I would expect coaches to be held to a hire level of accountability than players. They cannot talk character if they their character is questionable. The NFL conduct rules should extend to everyone that is grossly overpaid by the NFL, players and coaches. If they won’t changed to be more inclusive then do it like Jerry. Make your team out of second chance guys. If punishment is given out on the basis of employment status and not actual acts, then figure out a way to deal with character and a sign some “bad apples” to free agency and prepare for a run at the Lombardi Trophy.

Go Cowboys!

change is gonna come

If I were to describe my political leaning, I would have to say it falls to the left. That is probably not a surprise to anyone reading this, especially if you know me or have heard one of my political diatribes live and in person. But the left is a big word, encompassing many people I have profound ideological differences with on many issues, so a more apt description is needed. To make my political worldview a little easier to explain, I would call it leftist until the revolution. What I mean by that is I think that to say reform is needed is an understatement, but I am wholly against dismantling the machinery of government. Some, not all, of the people that call for a revolution think of only the overthrow and the idealist world of [insert your political utopia], and not the string murders and instability that must follow a revolution. Revolution sounds like a great idea until the roads and schools fall apart. We live in a society that has grown dependant on its state to control so much of our day to day life that any revolution would require a massive relearning of how to live.

Where am I going with this? I’m getting there.

All this thought of revolution and reform pushed my mind to think about the other side of the matter; the conservative. The modern conservative has an interesting mindset. Conservatives, by definition, want to keep society from changing. If history has taught us anything, it is that society is going to move, forward or backward. Conservatives must know that they are going to loose on some battles. As the late great soul stirrer Sam Cooke sang, change is gonna come. I don’t mean to imply the Hegelian notion of an end to history that pushes society ever towards some utopia. It is not chaos then community, nor community then chaos, but a choice; community or chaos. But the fact is that the wheels are turning and society is going to go in one way or another. Conservatives are fighting against this push, trying to freeze society in its tracks so the world remains the same for, as Edmund Burke described, the dead the living and the yet unborn. This means then that Conservatism is defined by what it is resisting. If Italian Fascist were trying to change with their coup attempt, wouldn’t the liberal forces aligned against them be conservatives? In the same manner, the pro US Cubans that fled once Fidel Castro took power are also conservative. Both groups are trying to resist a force for change.

Within the US, conservatives were a coalition of evangelicals, hard-line foreign policy ideologues with a Hobbsian worldview, whites that feel short-changed by the civil rights movement, and small government laissez faire capitalist. With the collapse of the Democratic Party’s New Deal Coalition, Nixon’s silent majority could be argued to be the first culmination of this coalition, but the real impetus for this coalition was the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Reagan brought all of these groups together by taking a new stand at the right time. He was going to get tough with the Soviets, whose continued existence was seen as a failure of the old order to get the job done. Reagan was also going to peel back some of the entitlements and give more money to those at the top of the economic ladder in order to bring the nation into the black. This coalition elected the last three Republican presidents, split by Clinton who had help from Ross Perot’s third party campaign that pulled votes from the George H. W. Bush’s reelection campaign.

This conservative coalition’s dominance ended with the Presidency of George W. Bush. There was no single incident that caused this coalition to fall apart, but a series of scandals and failures that haunted the Republican Party throughout the last seven and a half years. This presidency was marred with corporate scandals, from the SEC to Capitol Hill hearings. These were no simply individual corporations and CEOs behaving irresponsibly, but many of these corporations funded the election and reelection of Bush. Add to that what is at best false intelligence and at worst out and out deception that led to the Iraq War, a failing peace keeping mission, a failure to find Osama bin Laden, what is at best an ill-equipped federal government struck by disaster or at worst a callous disregard for the lives of poor people living in the Gulf Coast, the string of lies that followed the tenure of Alberto Gonzalez, the Valerie Plame investigation, Jack Abramoff scandal, and the stepping down of many Generals during this Iraq war. Add all of this to the scandals that dragged down the Republican Party leadership, such as the Ted Haggard sex/drugs scandal or Rush Limbaugh’s drug addiction. These scandals all came from the top of the Party and split young Evangelicals away from the GOP. I think this is evident in hearing the issues that young Evangelicals are concerned with (social justice and community values) and the Red Letter Christian movement. Moreover, the older Evangelical voters who voted on a basis of gay marriage abortion must feel let down by a party that made a lot of promises but failed to deliver a real blow to either system. Gay marriage is still a state issue and abortion is still legal.

So this takes us to the coming election. Senator John McCain has a hefty lead over his opponent Mike Huckabee and will more than likely be the Republican nominee, but he has no base to pull from. As a friend pointed out to me, McCain will have to move right to get some of the base on his side and then move center to get the undecided, while whichever nominee wins the democratic ticket will only have to move to the center. The conservative talk radio hosts have by and large come out against McCain, some saying that they will vote for Hillary Clinton if given the chance. With the reports of McCain’s possible infidelity with a lobbyist coming from the New York Times, one must wonder, who can he call on to win? What is left of the base seems to be against him because of his less than hard right stances on big business and his own admittance of a limited knowledge of the economy. If the center was to support him, it will not so long as he continues to trumpet the need to continue this war for 100 years if necessary. The strategy of “I can manage this war better” failed John Kerry and I don’t see it carrying over too well this time around when the war is seen by so much of the electorate as a failure, with or without the surge. In the end, I don’t believe that this is McCain’s year. He is not inspiring the right the way that they would need to be to beat the charismatic Barack Obama or the experienced Clinton election machine. This year the conservatives will watch, protest, and cringe at whatever changes happen to the world they know, be it a raise in the pay of teachers, expanded higher education, an end to this war, or universal health care. But that is part of conservatism. When society is going to change, you brace against it and let as little through as possible.