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Monday, January 21, 2008

"If they can't cut it or drug it, they don't know what to do."

Butt Out of Baseball by Charley Reese:
"One reason Congress is so inefficient and ineffective is that it wanders off the reservation too often, wasting time on topics and matters that the Constitution gives it no authority to mess with...

Baseball is a game, and in the case of professional baseball, it is a commercial enterprise. Last time I checked, maintaining the purity of sports was not included in the powers assigned to Congress by the Constitution. In the meantime, there are plenty of legitimate government sins, crimes and goofs that need the public spotlight.

I'm not a fan of any kind of drugs, legal or illegal, prescription or over-the-counter. Yet we should face the fact that ours is a drug-saturated society. Not only do the pharmaceutical companies bombard us with billions of dollars' worth of advertising for their various nostrums and pills, most Americans seem to approve of them. This topic always brings to mind the comment of a chiropractor who said of medical doctors, "If they can't cut it or drug it, they don't know what to do."

Apparently, millions of children are put on drugs to "cure" what used to be called "restlessness" or "boredom." What are these but performance-enhancing drugs for the classroom? At the same time, one can say with fair certainty that the prevailing philosophy in America, such as we have, is that winning is the only thing that counts. So, if winning is all that counts, and we already drug just about everything that walks on two legs, why shouldn't athletes take performance-enhancing drugs?

...At any rate, Congress has far more serious problems to attend to without wasting its time on baseball players. With the economy skittering on the brink of the dump, with other major powers becoming more alienated, not to mention health, environmental and agricultural problems, these overpaid politicians should adopt at least a 40-hour workweek and do the jobs they're paid to do."

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