CT Blue

Every Red Sox fan knows that there is no worm more low than a former member of the Boston Red Sox who voluntarily plays for the Yankees. Besides that, even when he was on the team, Roger Clemens was a gold plated [your choice of private body part here]. So, I have very little sympathy for Roger as he squirms before a Congressional panel.

Except for one thing. The Congresspersons who have dragged him to Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike, make even Roger look good. Time out of mind members of Congress have believed they can goose their own ratings by dragging Hollywood celebrities and sports stars in front of the cameras. The jocks, especially, are easy pickings. Not terribly well educated, on the whole, and not up to verbal sparring. They’re like deer in headlights, and it’s easy to make them look bad. A hell of a lot easier than actually having to adequately prepare to effectively question an Administration flunky, assuming said flunky will deign to testify.

Far easier, also, than doing an effective job of going after telecoms that are invading our privacy (immunity for them) or presidents that are shredding the constitution, or presidential henchpersons who blow Congress off and won’t even testify about things that are actually important. Why should we care, more than an eentsy teesny bit, about whether Roger Clemens takes steroids? Yet on this issue we have a bipartisan consensus that it is an important issue, inasmuch as it gives them a bipartisan excuse to grandstand, and it has the secondary and salutary effect of distracting us from the fact that they are not doing their real jobs. They can go after Roger because he can’t blow off their subpoenas, but they can’t and won’t go after Harriet Meirs, or Josh Bolton, or any of the rest of the crew that has told them to stuff it when they’ve made their feeble attempts to actually do the people’s business and investigate the sink of corruption that is the Bush Administration. The Bush Administration, through its Attorney General, has told them that it is not subject to the law. Roger Clemens’ steroid use evokes their righteous anger; George Bush’s imperial pretensions evokes barely a peep of protest.