Sports Writers and Politics: A Second Take

It seems that it should be a universal rule that sports writers and commentators should never breach into other topics, especially something as high as politics.  Jay Nordlinger wrote a wonderful column for National Review on the subject, which came out at during a time (2005 to be exact) when sports writers, in the middle of describing a walk-off win in extra innings or a late touchdown catch to secure a win, felt the need to interject some riff about Dick Cheney or link some boneheaded play to the supposed incompetence of the Bush Administration.  A sample:

Perusing [Sports Illustrated's] website, you might suspect that anti-Cheney remarks are required from all SI writers. These remarks amount to a big, collective tic. Have a passage on a San Antonio Spur: “[He] remains as unpopular among non-Spurs as Dick Cheney is among Democrats, Independents, Americans with no political affiliation, a growing number of Republicans, the great majority of the world population as well as that poor guy he filled with buckshot.”

But in the growing scandals of the Obama Administration--in trying to erase the fact that the State Department did not heed the repeated warnings on the lack of security by then-Ambassador Chris Stevens prior to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi and the ensuing attempt to try to fool the American people and blame it on a video instead of Muslim terrorists; the IRS singling out groups of a certain political bent and then covering up who knew what and when, which included then-acting IRS head Steven Miller lying to Congress in early 2012; and the Justice Department under Eric Holder doing things that were only dreamed of in the heads of leftist columnists during the Bush Administration--, (stay with me here) sports writers, in a sense, have actually proved themselves even more capable talking about politics than the political writers and commentators themselves.  I base this all on on observation made by James Taranto late last week in the WSJ:

One thing we have learned from the IRS scandal is that sports journalists are morally superior to political journalists. Whereas the former understand that cheating is an assault on the basic integrity of the sport, the latter all too often treat it as if it were just part of the game.

It is a sad state of affairs in the world when that observation is true.