Tim's Favorite Blogs
Media Matters
Blog Directories
Monday, November 17. 2008
Two Questions
Football — American football — is a religious experience, be it college or pro. We all bow to different gods, mine happen to be the Wisconsin Badgers and the Green Bay Packers, but football fans around America are the same — we all sit in rapt audience as our gods compete with one another in the many coliseums of our kingdom for the honor of those who worship.“Those who worship?”
Yep, like the Greek and Roman gods of old, who toyed with humanity for their entertainment, each god (or goddess) with his or her own phalanx of worshipers, like American football, defined primarily by geography. The patron god of Troy, the primary god, was Apollo, bringer of sun and director of the muses.
One thing I really didn’t like about the movie Troy the epic film starring Orlando Bloom, Eric Bana and Brad Pitt, was that the producers eliminated all the activity of the gods, Apollo’s role in the death of Achilles, how Apollo shot arrows tipped with the plague into the Greek soldiers. Sad how Hollywood takes such liberties.
We worship football in the same way, those of us who are fans. When our team plays, we praise their game, encourage their victory, pray they vanquish the foe and when our team wins, we celebrate. When our team loses, we trudge sadly as if the world has come tumbling down.
My Packers, they have but a 50-50 season so far. Thankfully, the NFC North Division is pretty abysmal so a .500 season is pretty good. In the division. The real grinding knife in the gut is that the New York Jets lead the AFC East Division with a .700 record. The effin’ Packers let Brett Favre go so they could start Aaron Rogers, Favre’s understudy for three years. Favre is now leading the Jets to the top of their division.The Badgers, on the other hand, once in the BCS Top Ten, have now fallen … °sigh° … into the depths of the Big Ten. Kimberlee Ann’s Penn State Nittany Lions share the Big Ten lead with Michigan State and Ohio State.
Our emotions rise and fall with the fate and standings of our gods — our teams. It gets really heated when your team is on top of the standings in their division, or in the case of the NCAA, conference. Those BCS standings … no one agrees with them. Anyone who isn’t a USC fan is certain the BCS has a bias for the Trojans. Why else would USC have the ranking it does? Okay, the Trojans are still a good team, 9-1. So, USC sitting at #7 isn’t really preferential treatment. Still, there are people who think something is wrong because USC probably won’t make it to the title game in Miami.
The BCS standings are controversial, especially if your team is just as good on paper as the two top teams. There has been a call for a championship play off system for at least a decade now, maybe longer. I’m old, can’t remember that far back. But the pitfalls are many.
So, when a national political leader says, on national television, there needs to be a NCAA playoff series for football — and that political figure is the new president-elect — that’s big news. Barack Obama, on 60 Minutes, says there needs to be a NCAA championship series to determine the national champion.Obama said it was important, that it was question that needed to be answered. Michelle Obama, obviously not as policy-savvy as her husband, recoiled not just from the question, but from the president-elect as well when he began his answer.
“I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this,” Obama said. “So I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
There you go Mr. President-Elect, job one when you’re sworn in: fix the NCAA championship.
Did you know the Army has a team of women soldiers who go into direct combat missions? They are called “Team Lioness” and their job is to calm and search Iraqi women and children in various combat raids. The women do fight and they have been wounded, but until recently, their team and involvement have been hidden from public view.We all have known women were thrust into combat by ambush and IED, but that they were directly included in combat — that’s news. One of the points that came out of the documentary is that the women were not prepared, were not trained for searches and interrogations or for combat. That is the scariest part of the story, a person serving with a Marine Fire Team, without the basic training one receives to effectively serve in a combat role.
Surprisingly, it was a Republican congressman who first tried bringing this to congressional attention in 2005 — my congressman, Duncan Hunter. He got the word from the White House to withdraw his question regarding the ban on women serving in combat roles; that question being a bill he sponsored that was attached to a defense appropriations bill that would codify the ban on women serving in forward combat positions, forcing the Pentagon to follow the law. So, Hunter withdrew the amendment and replaced it with one the effectively did nothing.
It’s time for the Army and Marines to start giving women advanced combat training. Regardless of whether women serve directly assigned as support for forward combat units or not, they do come under attack with their fellow Soldiers and Marines.
And let’s be honest about it: women are in combat and trained as machine gun operators for defensive purposes when they go out in convoys. Women who serve deserve the same training to succeed and survive during combat.
The secrecy of Team Lioness is just one more infuriating legacy of the worst presidency in our history.
Calendar
Quicksearch
Archives
Categories
AD Links
Referrals
Syndicate This Blog
Blog Administration
Powered by
TheForkesReport