In LA

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “the most powerful investigative panel in Congress” according to the Gray Lady¹ is spending time investigating whether baseball pitching great Roger Clemens used steroids back in 1998.

If my understanding is correct, this means that my taxes are funding an investigation into whether a ball player took pills and injections with the goal of making him throw a round white object a little faster. While I will grant that one of our government’s core functions is to make sure that the scourge known as the designated hitter rule doesn’t spread beyond the American league…

–but seriously, what an incredible waste of time, resources, and priorities. Let Major League Baseball and the World Anti-Doping Agency deal with the case. If the league, a private enterprise, wants to ban the use of such substances, let them spend their own money policing it themselves. It’s bad enough that public money goes to fund sports stadiums for the use of private businesses.

At this rate, the government will soon be holding congressional hearings into whether the gladiators on American Gladiators are juiced, whether Tyra Banks’ breasts are real, or whether members of the Grateful Dead (or their fans) used a lot of LSD.

Should I care more about this? Am I just becoming a cranky old man?

1. the most powerful newspaper in the land, after USA Today and The Onion [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Entitled Ranting, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.