Earl Ofari Hutchsinson and the Black Juicers Liberation Front

In an earlier entry, I discussed how columnist Earl Ofari Hutchinson has a tendency to ignore big issues and instead focus on trivial bullshit. Sunday, he did something far worse.

Imagine this scenario:

Martin Luther King standing at the podium at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 1963 and uttering these words:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the content of their character, but by the grandness of their stats.

Because that is more or less the point that Hutchinson inadvertently made in his piece, which propounds that the only reason Bonds is facing a perjury trial is because he was a black man who had the audacity to eclipse Babe Ruth. Never mind that the home run record holder had been another African-American, the widely admired Hank Aaron, before Bonds obliterated it with the help of modern chemistry. Basically, Hutchinson is insisting that it is okay to lie to a grand jury in a steroid manufacturing and distribution investigation because his skin color is of a darker hue than Pat Boone's.

Hutchinson then goes on to ask why Roger Clemens isn't in the same predicament. Is Earl paying attention? Clemens is not only being investigated for lying before a congressional committee, but he has been roundly humiliated by the recent revelations of his steroid use that showed that his previous denials concerning his employment of them had been lies. Right now, mud doesn't want to be associated with Clemens, such is the low his public image has sunk to.

Part of the credibility problem many black leaders and writers have with the broader American public is that too many of them are willing to excuse not just misbehavior, but even murder (think O.J. Simpson) because whitey owes them one after two hundred years of slavery and another century of segregation. Nobody with a brain is buying that nonsense.

Hutchinson, Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Danny Bakewell, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Maxine Waters and that whole lot of narcissistic hustlers have neutered the "content of their character" part of the King dream and see blackness as inherently more virtuous than any other race (which is a false anthropological construct anyway) by dint of victimhood.

Roman emperor Nero had been molested by his father, emperor Tiberius (this is true), so now we should excuse Nero's depredations on his people because of that? Not happening. Nero gets no sympathy from historians and so Bonds deserves none from the public.

Yeah, I know that what Nero did is of far greater import than Bonds' actions. But you get my point. If you want legal equality then you also have to be willing to accept equality of judgment of your moral character. And Bonds, as well as Clemens and A-Rod, flunked.

Bonds and Hutchinson aren't part of King's dream; they are a segment of his nightmares.

Did Selena Roberts Trivialize Her Career With Her Book on A-Roid? Oh Yeah

Huffington Post Contributor Chris Kyle wrote a piece that actually didn't do anything more than highlight the reactions in the press to Selena Robert's book, A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez. concerning steroid and other alleged performance enhancing drugs use by Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez.

One of the highlighted passages was a rant by the redoubtable Jason Whitlock, a Kansas City Star columnist, who is generally not known as a friend of jocks who get out of line. He has even attacked the behavior of what he called "today's hip hop athlete" for being the reason for major league baseball and other sports leagues not signing more black players.

Unfortunately, Whitlock compared Roberts book to the idiotic unjust prosecutions of the Duke lacrosse players by grandstanding DA Mike Nifong. Swing and a miss Jason.

Aside from the fact that Rodriguez is unlikely to ever face jail time for his juicing, the $250 million man has indeed been found out to be doing something underhanded and in violation of MLB rules. This isn't Snow White we're talking about. This is the phoniest pro athlete in America.

That Kyle allows Whitlock's hysterical exegesis to be used as some kind of credible condemnation of Roberts admittedly gratuitous and lurid tome brings no light to this issue. You also have to take into account that while people around A-Rod, guys like Shane Spencer, a dubious character himself, and former Yankees first sacker Doug Mientkiewics deny that they saw any evidence that A-Rod was building better muscles through chemistry or tipping pitches, Rodriguez himself has denied nothing, only using, to quote Chrissy Hynde in "Brass in Pocket," his sidestep when reporters attempt to query him on the allegations at hand.

If you are a juror and a man is innocent, you generally want to hear him profess his purity from the witness stand. A-Rod, who would be in no legal jeopardy for issuing a denial, continues to stand silent, which makes jurors, that is, the sporting public, look at him even further askance.

As for Roberts herself, well, the NY Times already had Jason Blair and Judith Miller (who is now working for Fox News) fall down on the journalistic job and her still to be proven allegations of high school steroid use and pitch tipping (which, if true, should earn him banishment from the game) are indeed, as Deadspin writer AJ Daulerio noted, the kind of thing Roberts used to bitch at bloggers about. And the book ends up thus looking like not a product of America's leading newspaper, but something out of the keyboard of the discredited NY Post Page Six writer Richard Johnson as a result. Heckuva job there, Selena.