God bless Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. Sure, he’s a
liberal Democrat and a loyal party apparatchik, but he’s also a
straight shooter. And so, he doesn’t feed you a line of bull.
Instead, he tells it like it is.
And Rendell absolutely hit the bull’s-eye with his
much-discussed comments about Roger Goodell and the National
Football league suits who had the gall to cancel Sunday night’s
game between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Minnesota
Vikings.
Indeed, Rendell made telling and poignant points about the
wussification of America, and the liberal-corporate paternalism
that has taken hold, and which seeks to eliminate any and all risk
— and thus, any and all fun — from life.
Goodell canceled the game because, get this: there was too
much snow. No, I’m not kidding. There was too much snow, said
Goodell and the league hierarchy. So the game had to be canceled,
rescheduled, and played two days later (last night).
Why, fans traveling in the snow might slip and fall and
hurt themselves! Or worse yet, they might get into a car accident.
So we have to protect people from themselves. We have to “ensure
public safety.”
This was too much for Rendell, who didn’t hesitate to
denounce this nonsense, and in no uncertain terms.
“I think it’s a joke,” the tough-talking Pennsylvanian
told Fox 29
News in Philadelphia Sunday night.
I mean, we canceled the game and there’s less than three
inches of snow in Montgomery County, where a lot of our fans come
from. There’s less than two inches in Wilmington, where a lot of
our fans come from.
In Philadelphia, we’ve got a great subway system; Broad
Street is fine; the Parkway is fine; 95 and the Expressway are
clear.
I think the fans can make their own judgments
about their own safety. This is football.
Good Lord: Vince Lombardi would be spinning in his grave that we
canceled a football game with this amount of snow….
Football is a cold weather sport. It should be played
unless there are blizzard conditions. This is in no way,
shape or form a blizzard…
As I said, we haven’t had one incident on our
roads. Our roads are all clear. We have a great subway
system.
And it’s football. Good lord: you schedule a football game
for Dec. 26 and you expect that you might have snow.
The next day, on a Philadelphia sports radio show, 97.5’s
The Fanatic, Rendell continued to speak truth to
power:
I think it goes against everything that football’s all
about… There’s no cancelation for bad weather in football. It’s
never happened before…
The San Diego Chargers and the Cincinnati Bengals played
an AFC Championship Game in a minus-64-degree wind chill. Nobody
cared about the fans. They let the fans make the judgment whether
they were going to go to that game or not go to that game. At the
time the game ended, there were about 5.5 inches of snow on the
ground.
People go to games in New England, [they] go to games in
Chicago, [they] go to games in New York routinely with that amount
of snow on the ground…
Rendell is absolutely right. Why, one of the most
memorable NFL games in recent history is the
2001-2002 AFC divisional playoff game between the New England
Patriots and the Oakland Raiders.
The game was played in Foxboro, Massachusetts, in the
midst of a veritable winter wonderland of heavily falling nighttime
snow. And the fans — those in attendance at the game, as well as
those watching on TV nationwide — loved it!
The snow added to the romance and mystique of the event,
which now lives in football lore.
The Pats, of course, escaped with a narrow three-point
win, thanks to the infamous “Tuck rule,”
which transmogrified a clear late fourth-quarter fumble by New
England quarterback Tom Brady into an inexplicable “incomplete
pass.”
The “incomplete pass” allowed New England to keep the ball
and to kick a game-tying field goal. The game then went into
overtime and the Pats won. Soon thereafter, the Patriots would win
their first of three Super Bowls within a four-year time
span.
So you can hardly blame Rendell for being peeved and
ticked. So, too, was every football fan in America. And the
governor spoke for them. He spoke for us.
I for one — and I’ve been stopped by tons of Eagles’ fans
today. We were looking forward to sitting in the snow. It would
have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And we could have made
the judgment for ourselves [about] whether it was safe or not…
But behold the liberal-corporate paternalism voiced by
Mike Missanelli, who hosts The Fanatic radio show.
Missanelli was dismissive of NFL players who have denounced the
league for canceling the game.
“The players are going to say that because they’re filled
with machismo!” Missanelli cried. “How could you shirk the public
safety angle of this, Governor?”
Rendell was incredulous. “The public safety [angle]?” he
responded. “Mike, [there were] five inches of snow… People drive in
that all the time… That’s their choice.”
Not according to Missanelli! You see, to liberal-corporate
paternalists, choice is a bad and dangerous thing — a very bad and
dangerous thing!
“OK,” he said.
But you know when you give people a choice — and you know
what you’re doing: You’re testing them, OK? They’re going to think
the same way: “Ah, it’s not so bad… You go down there.” And
you know that it’s like having a gun to their
head…
Well, as Saturday Night Live’s “The Church Lady”
put it, “Isn’t that special?!” Choice is “like having [or putting]
a gun to people’s head.” Really?!
That certainly explains a lot. It certainly explains why
the Left and the Democratic Party refuse to give parents a choice
of where to send their kids to school, refuse to give young people
a choice of where to invest their Social Security, and refuse to
give hunters and sportsmen a choice of guns and weapons.
And it also explains why “Comprehensive National Health
Insurance” — aka Obamacare — is designed to progressively
restrict our healthcare choices and options such that a
“single-payer” healthcare system — aka socialized medicine —
becomes, over time, a de facto reality for all
Americans.
Even our military personnel now will be denied the choice
of whether or not to serve in units that are free of open
homosexuality and “sensitivity training.”
As Rendell explained, “People are always underestimating
the intelligence of [the American] people.”
“My biggest beef is… what’s happened in this country,” he
said.
I’m saying that we’ve become a nation of wusses… In most
places in the world, people would have sneered at this.
This is football… It’s a game that should be played in
all-weather conditions. And the fans can make [these] judgments for
themselves…
“The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything,” Rendell
continued.
If this was in China, do you think the Chinese would have
called off the game? People would have been marching down to the
stadium. They would have walked, and they would have been doing
calculus on the way down…
[This represents] the Wussification of
America.
…See if you can get [former Minnesota Viking coach and
Hall of Famer] Bud Grant on the phone? What do you think Lombardi
would have said? He would say that we have become a nation of
wusses.”
In some respects, that’s all too true. Why, try building a
high-jump diving board at any public town or municipal swimming
pool. You can’t do it. The lawyers have made it
impossible.
Too much “risk,” don’t you know! Why, kids might hurt
themselves when jumping 10 feet into the water. So we have to ban
high-jump diving boards — or at least make them too costly to
build.
Football was the one sport that we thought was protected
from liberal-corporate paternalism, but not anymore. Thanks to
Roger Goodell and the effete American suits who run the NFL,
football is now just part and parcel of what Rendell rightly calls
the “wussification of America.”
Problem is much of the world isn’t filled with wusses.
It’s filled with tough-minded foes and adversaries, many of whom
would destroy us if they could, and nearly all of whom would love
to bury us (figuratively speaking, I mean).
Time, then, to toughen up. Time to reject the
“wussification of America.” Time to reject Roger Goodell and the
effete NFL suits. Time to reject liberal-corporate
paternalism.
