On a Sooner basketball forum that I frequent, a strange…well, not strange, but interesting thing happened. Someone posted Barrack Obama’s NCAA basketball tournament bracket. His picks didn’t fare too well. Well, that’s being kind. The fact is they stunk, like NY City sewer stinky. The picks are from a tall Kenyan-American that couldn’t break the starting lineup of his high school in Hawaii, not exactly a hotbed of basketball prowess. Somehow as president though, he has transformed into the reincarnation of Michael Jordan, which is too bad for MJ since he’s still alive.
Now ninety-five percent of the posters on that board are dyed in the wool fanatics of Oklahoma University sports that agree on almost all things Sooner. Switzer is the King, Stoops is the greatest, Capel is the best, yadda, yadda. Yet, when someone injected Obama’s bracket into the cozy confines of this small fan board, all Hades broke loose. These people that agree, began to disagree, nastily.
My observation is it tended to split along age groups for the most part, with the young Turks siding with the “Big O” as they called him, and the more elder of us scoffing at this suddenly inflated basketball great.
The first salvo was about how he shouldn’t be spending his precious time filling out brackets, but should be devoting his full attention to the serious problems America is facing currently. This is a specious argument to me. I personally don’t expect a president to devote every minute to being president. His lousy picks proved he must not have spent too much time on the brackets anyway, so no harm, no foul.
For my part, I read the posts, chuckled and moved on. A day later that thread had ballooned to 4 or 5 pages of responses, so I knew something had heated up. I smelt politics co-mingling with sports. I clicked it again to read up on the pros and cons of the Big O’s bracketology. What I found was post after post about Obama’s greatness in basketball and politics. There were the obligatory comparisons to Bush, negative of course, and slams on McCain. The one that stuck out to me said “at least we now have a president that cares about sports”.
This caught my eye because George W. Bush was a part owner of the major league baseball team, the Texas Rangers. Either this person was too young to remember, OR his Bush derangement syndrome was so bad he couldn’t give credit to Bush for anything, OR he was so eat up with the Obama is better at EVERYTHING, that he couldn’t be objective. Whatever the reason, I posted that it was silly to assume Obama cared more about sports, by virtue of filling out a bracket, than the guy who had owned a major league team.
I was promptly told I had a blind, ignorant rage toward Obama, and I was called two derogatory names regarding male anatomical appendages.
If someone cannot acknowledge that Obama’s bracket stunk and he’s not, in fact, Michael Jordan in the Oval Office, how will they ever see the more consequential things he does wrong? I voted for Bush, twice. He did a lot of things correctly as president. I can also recite dozens of things that Bush did wrong. Way wrong!
This is a fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals as I see it. Conservatives tend to view politicians as employees hired to serve their and the nations interests. Liberals tend to view politicians as parents running everything, including their lives. Remember being a kid and thinking Dad and Mom could do no wrong? Well, for these guys and gals Obama is not the Big O, he is Daddy. He does no wrong. Which would be great, except for the fact that he does plenty wrong. They aren’t small things like basketball brackets either. They are big things like spending our money like a drunken sailor on shore leave in Bangkok.
If you call him on it, you are attacked personally, because you are attacking dear old Daddy. Look at Joe the Plumber (attacked by the media and Ohio Governor appointees), Rick Santelli (attacked by the White House), and Jim Cramer (attacked by Jon Stewart) for examples of this. You are dismissed as being irrelevant because you cant see the visionary plans that Daddy is implementing. For these folks of the left that claim nuance and shades of gray as a way of life, they see their politicians in very black and white terms, especially Daddy Obama.
Chris Matthews has thrills. Keith Olbermann gets chills. The liberal media doesn’t even try to hide its bias any longer. They are all so proud of Daddy they simply cannot contain it. And closer to home, I get called names on a usually civil forum board, because I dared to point out Daddy’s limited basketball expertise.
Cheers!
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