Who Is DeMaurice Smith? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Who Is DeMaurice Smith?
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Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh was dropped from a group bidding to buy the St. Louis Rams.
— ESPN’s Adam Schefter on Wednesday.

It is, of course, another example of the game within the game.

On the surface, the National Football League is just about football. You know, big guys knocking each other around in a stadium filled with tens of thousands in front of television cameras showcasing the game for tens of millions. All under the benign gaze of American rich guys and girls, the proud team owners, who have bought or purchased their way into ownership of an NFL team after a lifetime of hard work or Daddy’s hard work.

So far, so good.

The problem? This is, politely put, an untruth. And, in recent days, a startlingly revealed untruth. An untruth that casts the NFL in a highly unpleasant light.

Yet the dirty little secret of the NFL seems to be that it is in the charge of people caring less about football than left-wing politics and all the implicitly racial and intolerant ideas that have been the vivid hallmark of the progressive movement and the Democratic Party from its inception in slavery days. Right down to the notion of which blacks will remain on the intellectual plantation in return for a PR pat on the head.

All done while putting on a public face of sweet, non-biased reasonableness concerned only for the great American game of football.

Don’t believe a word of it.

Case in point of the latter is one DeMaurice Smith.

Who is DeMaurice Smith? 

On the surface, in his role as Executive Director of the NFL Players Union he’s a Defender of the Game. Unity. Apple Pie. Motherhood. He is out there with a Deeply Serious, Fair-Minded Defense of The Players. This is what Smith said in a now much publicized e-mail to the Player’s Union executive committee.

I’ve spoken to the Commissioner [Roger Goodell] and I understand that this ownership consideration is in the early stages. But sport in America is at its best when it unifies, gives all of us reason to cheer, and when it transcends. Our sport does exactly that when it overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.

Gosh.

How wonderful.

“America at its best.” “Unifies.” “Reason to cheer.” “Transcends.” “Overcomes division and rejects discrimination and hatred.”

Isn’t that lovely.

Buckle in. America’s beloved NFL appears to be a living lie. 

Let’s focus on Mr. Smith.

DeMaurice Smith is, hard to believe, a hard core cheerleader for Team Obama. Specifically, Smith gave $3,300 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign between 2007 and 2008. according to the Federal Elections Commission. When he wasn’t busy giving money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Party of Virginia, the re-election campaign of the District of Columbia’s Democratic U.S. House non-voting delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Indiana’s Democratic Senator Evan Bayh and, in the way back, the presidential campaign of Democrat Senator John Kerry.

That would be seven contributions total, all to liberal or left-wing Democrats.

You think there might be just the teensiest bit of conflict of interest in Mr. Smith’s straight-faced insistence that he is all about dealing in unity, cheering, transcending, overcoming division and hatred?

What a laugh.

So what does Mr. Smith do in his real life when he isn’t busy juggling the massive conflict of interest that is using the façade of football to zap one of the leading opponents of Mr. Obama, the man to whom Smith has channeled $3,300? Why…wait for it….Smith is a lobbyist on the payroll of the DC lobbying powerhouse Patton Boggs and Blow.

How do we know this? Because Patton, in the wonderfully condescending way that liberal Democrats have with the blacks on their short-leashed intellectual plantation, let the world know how proud they were not of Mr. Smith’s legal and lobbying skills. No, they let the world know how proud they were that their House Black Lobbyist got an award.

Here’s the beginning of the announcement from Patton:

Patton Boggs LLP Partner DeMaurice Smith Named One of “The Top Fifteen Black White-Collar Criminal Defense Attorneys” by Corporate Crime Reporter

August 08, 2007

Washington, D.C., August 8,—Patton Boggs LLP congratulates DeMaurice Smith on being named one of “The Top Fifteen Black White-Collar Criminal Defense Attorneys” by Corporate Crime Reporter newspaper. Mr. Smith was selected based a survey of white-collar criminal defense attorneys. Corporate Crime Reporter has been published for over 20 years. Subscribers include: federal and state prosecutors, major white-collar and corporate crime defense law firms, trial lawyers, major corporations, law school libraries, and large media outlets.

Got that? Mr. Smith is not one of the “top fifteen white-collar criminal defense attorneys.” Nooooooooooooooo. In the style of the Jim Crow system these people invented and cherish to this day as racial quotas and identity politics, Mr. Smith is one of the top fifteen black  white collar criminal defense attorneys. Hey, no racial stuff there, right? 

This is shameful.

But unfortunately, sad to say, apparently quite the norm within the NFL and the sports journalist community.

Notice the statement from Rush foe Kevin Blackistone of FanHouse.com. Mr. Blackistone is another sports journalist who apparently believes in judging people by skin color. And as readers of this column know, we have a firm rule that people who believe in judging others by skin color and reject, by their words, the concept of a colorblind society, should themselves be labeled by skin color. So here’s what Black Kev had to say in his furtherance of a non-colorblind society:

If the league accepted whatever bid the group including Limbaugh puts up, it would be a slap in the face to at least two-thirds of its players, and that is selling short the other third. The two-thirds I am referring to are the NFL players who are black. The other third are players of every other hue… [Emphasis added.]

Got that? Black Kev has done a bean count of the skin color in the NFL. Not a quality count. Not a performance count. A skin color count. 

Bull Connor would love this guy.

But there’s more to this than the NFL coming up way short on the notion of a color-blind league and conflict of interest with a sudden interest in the political leanings of its owners and players. It’s about more than a Commissioner who pretends to have a horror of divisiveness while quietly giving his contributions to some of the most controversial and divisive left-wing politicians on Capitol Hill. It’s about more than a team owner who claims NFL owners must watch their words and thoughts but is an active giver to the same divisive and controversial left-wingers that the Commissioner so admirers. 

This is really about liberals in control of yet another American institution and pretending that what they do is all in the interest of some objective, impartial and quite professional version of truth, justice and the American way. When in fact this appears to be a deliberate, willful untruth.

Other examples:
• The mainstream media pretending they are strictly objective reporters of the news.

• The publishing industry (pre-conservative book success) pretending conservative authors simply didn’t exist or have anything to say the public would be interested in reading.

• The federal court system. This charade was broken up by the full out opposition to Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination by liberals who once insisted qualifications were the be-all-and-end-all of reasons to support or oppose a nominee.

• The public school system, nominally neutral but in fact the iron-fist of liberal teacher’s unions.

• Mainline Protestant churches, hemorrhaging members as the rank-and-file finally understand their collection dollars are going to leftwing causes.

• The federal bureaucracy, nominally neutral but in fact fierce opponents of any conservative president’s agenda.

Surely there are more.

But this list now includes the NFL, its mask dropping to reveal to startled fans that behind that mask is a collection of politically correct bigots who are so drenched in the sewer of racial politics as to think this country has rocketed back in time to the days when liberals were enthusiastic champions of slavery and lynching.

Which brings up the point of the false statement — that would be a lie — in which Rush Limbaugh supposedly said slavery “had its merits.”

The irony here is that this disgraceful episode that has sent one of the most decent, colorblind men in American football fandom packing from NFL ownership has unintentionally revealed a shocking fact. The fact? That there are indeed a number of people fearful of offending the NFL leftwing Massa’s of the politically correct racial plantation that is the game of professional football.

The NFL is apparently not the game of ability and sportsmanship its fans were led to believe, but a charade, where so-called “sports journalists” judge players and owners by skin color and political views. Where the inside game inside the game can trot out a 12-year player like tackle Roman Oben to actually say; “Character is a constant point of emphasis for NFL and team officials when it comes to the players; potential owners should be held to the same level of scrutiny and accountability” — without revealing in his Washington Post attack on Rush Limbaugh, as real character would require, that, just like DeMaurice Smith, he too is a contributor to Democratic liberal political candidates.

The NFL, it seems, is run by those playing patty-cake with liberal politicians — most of them white — all the while pretending they never heard the phrase “appearance of a conflict of interest” when dealing with a potential owner whose politics are not theirs.

How does the game of professional football really work? Is it really any different than the plantation system that founded and funded the Democratic Party?

You can ask DeMaurice Smith the Obama supporter. He’s still somewhere on the vast acreage of this intellectual plantation.

Shameful.

Jeffrey Lord
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Jeffrey Lord, a contributing editor to The American Spectator, is a former aide to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. An author and former CNN commentator, he writes from Pennsylvania at jlpa1@aol.com. His new book, Swamp Wars: Donald Trump and The New American Populism vs. The Old Order, is now out from Bombardier Books.
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