An Experiment in Scotch

Thursday, May 27, 2004

I've often wondered about the sanity of people who scream about the hated Yankees but the more I see of the Los Angeles Lakers, the more I understand the hatred of those doing the screaming.
9:55:24 PM

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Some Democrats think Kerry should stay on careful path. The fact that any Democrats think this at all shows that they have very little platform to stand on with Kerry other than the "I'm not Bush" platform. I don't find that compelling and I expect the rest of America to do the same thing. It's a real gamble to hope things stay the same or get worse. Assuming the economic news continues to be positive, only Iraq will be interesting and everything I've heard out of Kerry is platitudes about international support. Even though Kerry is polling ahead of Bush currently, I just don't see it continuing after the convention when people start to hear what he does or does not stand for.

Key quote from the article:

Until now, Mr. Kerry has more often than not displayed a caution that is very much in keeping with his style as a candidate over the past 20 years, particularly when he is not feeling threatened. He reacted mildly to Mr. Bush's speech on Iraq on Monday. And on Wednesday, Mr. Kerry backed away from a heavily criticized proposal to put off accepting his party's nomination at the Democratic convention, a maneuver to delay the imposition of general election spending caps.
Two things to note about this. First, Kerry has been cautious (read: non-committal) his entire career. And closely related to that, he backed away from his proposal to put off the nomination (read: He tried something, the public thought it was ridiculous so he gave it up). The constant changes in what he thinks and believes is going to haunt Kerry and not taking a stand now will do little to change that. I'm still predicting Bush in a big way in the fall unless terrorism really does come to our shores again.
8:33:56 PM

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Gary Barnett has been reinstated as football coach at Colorado which is most likely a good thing. I found it hard to believe from the beginning that a coach and his staff at a major Big 12 school would knowingly develop a program to recruit athletes with sex and alcohol. Any one who has been around 17 year olds would know that eventually, one of them would either get rejected, not get the scholarship he thought he deserved or just decide to rat the coach out for the publicity. So I think this is a good decision, one that got past the political correct crap.

That said, we have to note the quote from one Joanne Belknap, a sociology professor at CU who had the following opinion on the reinstatement:

It's very troubling to me that the Hnida comments alone weren't enough to get him fired. His smugness, his statements that he doesn't need to do anything differently & those are all the markings of a bad coach. I can't believe Gary Barnett can say these unbelievably sexist, hateful and victim-blaming things and he gets to keep his huge [$1.2 million] salary.
This woman is clearly deranged. Calling Hnida a terrible player gives her far more credit than she deserves. I saw her try to kick in the New Mexico bowl game last year. It was worse than terrible. If Barnett had called a male player "terrible", no one would have batted an eye, whether he spoke the truth or not. In this case, he was being completely truthful (though her terribleness probably didn't have any relevance to the case) and this woman thinks he should be fired over it.

I'm not sure calling Hnida's play terrible is victim-blaming but it's definitely true. The very fact that she was on the team is unbelievable and a testament to how far the woman's movement has come in the past 50 years. But that doesn't make her any better. She probably never should have been on the team in the first place. And to listen to someone say Barnett should be fired for saying Hnida was terrible is laughable.
8:15:23 PM What do you think? [] trackback []