I didn’t intend on getting into this, but I had the Congressional hearing on, with Roger Clemens, and there’s an important point which needs to be made. (Picture from 108 Red Stitches.)
Does politics really trump everything? Does the truth of something mean nothing? Or is everything just a function of which political party you belong to?
Let’s be clear. Roger Clemens is a Republican, a staunch one, a charter member of the "jockocracy" who got rich off sports and thus identifies with the rich.
That fact should mean nothing regarding whether Roger Clemens used performance-enhancing drugs. The Congressional committee should be testing the evidence, and acting in an impartial manner as much as possible.
I don’t know the truth, but I have suspicions. I know what Clemens looked like a decade ago. I know what he looks like now. His head is two sizes larger. That is one side-effect of steroid use. And his record over the last 10 years, his success in continuing to pitch well into his 40s, also has to be seen suspiciously. Especially in light of the specific allegations contained in the Mitchell Report, and the further evidence offered by former trainer Brian McNamee.
Every case of conspiracy is, as prosecutors say, a piece of shit. That is you depend on members of the conspiracy, criminals, to testify against others. You expect drug dealers to rat on their customers, customers on their dealers, and you don’t judge guilt or innocence based on party affiliations.
Do you?
Yet here were Republicans like Dan Burton and Virginia Foxx rushing
to Clemens’ defense, acting as though this were a court and they were
his defense attorneys. And there were Democrats seeking to condemn him.
I found all the rhetoric from Burton about guilty until proven
innocent especially galling and laughable. Given that Burton was a
card-carrying leader of the 1990s’ conspiracy against President Bill
Clinton, given that he was a man who always assumed Clinton was guilty
of everything which anyone concocted against him, the hypocrisy in his
statement was beyond belief.
If Clemens is innocent until proven guilty in a court of public
opinion, then so was Clinton. On every single issue I’ve seen in the
last two decades, when people have come before Congress, the question
seems to not have been truth, but which party the accused belonged to.
And the solons lined themselves up accordingly.
Not everything is politics. Those who make everything politics do a
great disservice to everything, both the facts and to politics.
It is this assumption, that everything and everyone must line up on
one side or the other, and that the truth of anything can be assumed
based on their political alignment, which I find most insulting about
this era. And this era has been going on for 40 years now, always
escalating, and always insinuating itself deeper-and-deeper into our
consciousness, so we no longer know anything but what someone’s
politics are, and judge everything else accordingly.
This does not have to be. This hasn’t always been the case. When
Sen. Harry Truman went after defense contractors in the early 1940s, he
didn’t give a pass to the Democrats and just grill Republicans. When
the Kefauver Committee went after organized crime in the 1950s, they
didn’t just attack Republican criminals and ignore the Democratic ones.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
We can change. And we will change. When we demand change.
Truth doesn’t have an R or a D after it. Anyone who thinks it does needs to go away.
