I don’t care about baseball. Of the major sports, it is my least favorite. I don’t devote much effort to following sports at all, but I follow boxing most closely, followed by Formula One, Scottish football and … well, everything else is far, far behind. I watch more of the Stihl Timbersports series in most years than baseball. (No, really.) So I was not exactly waiting on the edge of my seat for the Mitchell Report.
I did note, however, that the hearings about steroids have mostly been moralizing and grandstanding, which are always bipartisan issues. Politicians love to adopt the posture of moral scolds.
Yesterday, though, a partisan pattern emerged, I think for the first time.
For those playing catch-up today, as I was yesterday, here’s the scoop: legendary pitcher Roger Clemens, who threw fastballs effectively well into his forties and has won more Cy Young awards (seven) than anyone in history, was accused of using human growth hormone and steroids by his former trainer, Brian McNamee. The former trainer says he did the injecting; there is some physical evidence to back him up and in an affidavit Clemens’s former teammate Andy Pettitte (who admits that McNamee injected HGH into him) claims that Clemens admitted to him that Clemens used HGH. Clemens, who says he wants to clear his name, was offered the chance to backpedal from public hearings after the evidence began to mount, but instead he went full-steam ahead and testified publicly that McNamee is lying, Pettitte is misremembering and he never used any illegal performance enhancers.
If you don’t care about any of this, I don’t expect you to start now. In fact, all of this background is an extended windup to make a partisan point.
Yesterday, Republicans (even the “moderate” ones like Chris Shays from Connecticut’s “gold coast,” but also Dan Burton, Tom Davis* and Darrell Issa) engaged in moralistic finger-wagging, and Democrats like Seth Waxman (who chairs the committee and is the unofficial most serious prosecutor in the House) engaged in moralistic finger-wagging. Shays and Darrell Issa, Republicans, called McNamee a drug dealer for providing players with performance enhancing medications; while Democrats were mostly interested in finding out if Clemens cheated to win money and fame and then lied to cover up his cheating.
That is to say, Democrats are worried that the rich, famous guy with all the advantages broke the law and the rules to become even more rich and famous, and then lied to get away with it. The Republicans openly idolized the rich, famous guy and were only interested in blaming the whistleblower. And that, right there, is why the Republicans have turned our economy back to the Gilded Age.
*Ranking Republican on the committee Tom Davis (R-Va) made an incredibly racist statement. He likened the tough questioning of Clemens, a white Texan, to lynching. Yes, he really did.