Letters to the Editor
FrodoCorleone
Published Letters: 2
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Don't Stop Covering the Steroids Scandal
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sports competitions are interesting because we don't know what's going to happen and because either competitor could conceivably win. It would not be fun to watch the Dallas Mavericks play the local junior high's JV team; the Professional Shooting Fish In A Barrel League would not draw well. Its all based on a level playing field. Cheating, whether it be recruiting a player who wouldn't ordinarily be allowed to play for your team or taking performance enhancing drugs, artificially alters this, but the fan watching doesn't know. Ignorance may be bliss, but it destroys the ability to truly appreciate reality. I thought Ben Johnson's 100 meter dash win in the Olympics was the most amazing physical accomplishment ever; it was as close to Superman as we were going to get. Until it was announced he was juiced. I guess there's part of me that wishes that story had never come out, because it was so amazing, but it did and allowed me to fully appreciate Michael Johnson's 200 meter win all the more a few years later. If you and other journalists do not continue to cover these stories, sports fans will unknowingly be participating in a lie. If the leaked grand jury testimony is true, Barry Bonds admitted to using PEDs when we thought he was just performing amazing acts of hitting. This is wrong and must be exposed, even if a bunch of Giants' fans don't want it to be. The public's desire to put its head in the sand doesn't make ignorance okay (see Iraq war).
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Hillary hanging on only hurts
[Read the article: Barack Obama's epic win]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Walter Shapiro's column today mentions that previous "presidential dreamers" were not demonized for taking their election fight all the way to their respective conventions, the way Clinton has. While I agree that Clinton has engendered more vitriol than she probably deserves (although not entirely undeserved), those dreamers' quixotic efforts should be a lesson: each one ended up weakening their party's general election campaign and resulted in sweeping defeat in the fall (Reagan's undermining of Pres. Ford suppressed conservative support against Carter's "I'm not Nixon" campaign; Kennedy's attack on the weak Carter presidency suppressed liberals support against Reagan's "Morning in America" pablum; Hart's campaign, while probably the longest shot of the three mentioned, probably had the least destructive effect, given the general incompentcy of the Mondale campaign). It also should be noted that each of the "insurgents" represented a distinct and important part of their party that felt underserved by the presumptive nominee (Reagan with the Far Right, Kennedy with the Far Left, and Hart with "young people"). With one exception, Hillary Clinton basically speaks for and to the same voters as Obama: people who want to be rid of the Bush Administration's incompetence with and indifference to foreign policy, the domestic economy, healthcare, education, science and the environment (the exception being that she appears to have courted and won over the uneducated, ignorant, and racist element of the Democratic Party; even if they are a sizable minority of the party base, I don't think it benefits America to promote their positions). Sen. Clinton's continued defiance of reality can only be seen as self-serving and the longer she allows the story to be about her efforts, the more damage she inflicts upon the Democratic Party's efforts.