Photo by sumrow via Flickr

As the debate over U.S. health care reform degenerated into a battle over partisan positioning, Democrats found themselves struggling to inject some kind of legacy into their foundered effort. This meant that — sans Public Option, post-abortion compromise — Senators Harry Reid, Max Baucus, Tom Harkin, and the rest of their aristocratic and anachronistic cronies were, for their respective pre-victory self-congratulations and predictions of economic armeggedon, forced to turn away from the bill for inspiration. Reid found himself destroying baseball history. Senator Christopher Dodd tried to tack his party’s slackened reform onto FDR’s four freedoms. Their colleagues invoked the bible and George Washington.

Sigh.

We here at Unfit value nothing more than a creative cut-and-paste job. Still, such a desperately wide array of historical snipping seems to betray a certain lack of … focus. So, in advance of what will surely be meant as an epoch-defining moment, we offer President Obama’s speech writers the following wholly-borrowed concise message. After these last few weeks of total bullshit, the least our failed leadership can do is grant us all the simple honesty of uniform plagiarism.

The Gospel According to Franklin Delano Washington, or The Full Senate at the Bat

Good evening sports fans.

This is a day of national consecration. And I am certain that on this day my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency the occasion of my signing the policy on which I have so clearly staked my Presidency, I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impels.

[Let me start by saying:] Do not be wise in your own eyes fear the LORD abstract concepts of socialism and shun evil a clear, comprehensive system of health care coverage. This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones. Honor the LORD Aetna with your wealth, with the first fruits of all your crops; Say to him it: ’Long life to you! Good health to you and your household! And good health to all that is yours!

The period for a new election of a citizen, to administer the executive government of the United States, being not [too] far distant, and the time actually arrived [in like 18 months], when your thoughts must be employed designating the person, who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprize you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made sign this hulking abortion of reform, and thus attempt to preserve for myself a chance at the Presidency in 2012.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

[Look duders, like Harkin said, this shit is just a starter health care bill.]

[Besides, this was SO HARD.] I mean, I was like: Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel [of health care reform] shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, that this woman hath done, the idea that it’s okay to be flexible, if you need to preserve your career, be told for a memorial of her to democracy. [But] [t]hen one of the twelve Senators, called Judas Iscariot Joseph Lieberman, went unto the chief priests Aetna, And said unto them, What will ye give me, and I will deliver him untoward profits unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver.

[So we had a choice. And we decided to call] together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine Muddied bill that day:
The score stood four to two Fifty-nine to Forty-one, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney Kennedy died at first, and Barrows Byrd [nearly] did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, if only Casey the full senate could get but a whack at that -
We’d put up even money, now, with Casey the full Senate at the bat.

But Flynn Lieberman preceded Casey the full Senate, as did also Jimmy Blake Ben Nelson,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey’s the full Senate’s getting to the bat.

[So we compromised. For now. Look, like Harkin said, this shit is just a starter health care bill.]

[L]et me [now] assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. [And for that, you might have to wait like six years. Like Harkin said, this shit is just a starter health care bill.]

Photo by hyku via Flickr

For those of us who prefer to spend our “working” afternoons in pursuit of player transaction gossip, Major League Baseball’s winter meetings are the highlight of the season. For a few days each December, the front office honchos from every MLB team, the agents who represent the millionaires who play for them, and the media whose job it is to report it all (and we mean all) gather in the lobby of some hotel room and try to swindle each other. In the process, general managers do their best to end up on the post-trade Frank Robinson/Babe Ruth side of things, agents do their best to have their players end up on the Kevin Brown side of things, and sports writers do their best to not end up on the Rob Neyer (scroll down) side of things. With so much action — and the scoop-hungry masses who are tasked to cover it — concentrated in one place, the winter meetings turn into something of a perfect storm for rumor-making.

Until this year, the worst to come out of all this might have been the hurt feelings of a player or two. But that was before the combination of Twitter and what one Winter Meeting press attendee characterized as the “mom’s basement contingent” conspired to make a mess of things in a manner that can only lead us observers to conclude that this whole new media democracy set-up is actually capable of policing itself.

On Monday at 3:00 p.m., Rotoworld senior baseball editor Aaron Gleeman tweeted that he and his colleagues were “going to learn a lot about everyone’s quality/standards of reporting this week” and that “[s]ome people aren’t gonna look so good.” Presumably, this was a reference to the same mom’s basement contingent that his fellow baseball rumor monger Jason Rosenberg had implied was polluting the proverbial well. Gleeman followed that up six minutes later with a response to a tweet from MLB Trade Rumors‘ Tim Dierkes (who’d taunted the rest of us with promises of a “spreadsheet that I will never share, with the major reports that were wildly wrong”) where he claimed that he wasn’t “going to go nuts ‘outing’ anyone,” but that it would “be tough not to remember what’s going on.”

We here at Unfit tried to get a hold of Gleeman so that he might enlighten us as to what was going on. But since we don’t seem to have the clout of, say, Peter Gammons, we got no response. So here’s a guess: Mom’s basement reporter-type hears some crazy rumor. Mom’s-basement reporter-type prints said rumor without so much as vetting it with any sources. Report gets tweeted, retweeted, and kind of becomes news. Until, that is, a not-so-mom’s-basement-reporter-type susses out the truth, sinking mom’s-basement-guy’s rumor and maybe his or her (well, we’ll guess his) fledgling career.

‘Course, without the ability to so quickly and widely publish his rumor, mom’s-basement guy is left with an audience of exactly his mom. A fact which should bring the whole Twitter thing home to those of us who are totally stoked about being able to receive news in real time. That’s nothing new. But that the mom’s-basement joker(s) got so jumped on serves as proof that not all media types are so blinded by the relative shiny newness of social media that they can’t police themselves. And that’s encouraging — even if the end result is that those of us who crave instant updates have to wait just a bit longer.

Photo by bikesnotscott via Flickr

Sports fans have been inundated this week with speculation — scientific and otherwise (all at the same time!) — about Bill Belichick’s decision to try to convert on fourth down, deep in his Patriots’ own territory, with very little time left in the game. And sure, it might have been a stupid call — or it might have been a brilliant call — but, his players failed to execute, his opponents got the ball back, and the rest is recent history. (Cue insanity all over sports talk radio.) For NFL pundits who’ve been itching to rip apart Belichick for his supposed arrogance, it was July 4 — all fireworks, picnics, and celebration. And though the event was certainly worthy of notice, what’s been lost in all of the gleeful post-game Belichick hate is that New England is still 6-3. Still in first place in the AFC East. And still — barring total collapse — playoff-bound, a status that has, let’s remember, been awfully kind to the franchise since 2001. Which is to say that the gutsy, brilliant, but ultimately failed effort from this past Sunday is illustrative of one thing only: That Bill Belichick is still the only reason to watch football.

If the past decade of sports history has taught Boston sports fans a single lesson it should be this: In the course of a game — or a series of games — there is no true predictable outcome. Oh sure, we can ogle the crap out of stats; use them, for example to vindicate superficially poor decisions, say — or explain why solid play from what might have seemed like an unlikely source, wasn’t really all that unlikely after all. But the truth, the real truth that belies even statistical analysis, is that we just don’t know what’s going to happen until it actually does. This is, as they say, why they play the game — and it’s why we watch it. Frankly, there’s a reason that only the most diehard fans can sit through a blow-out. I mean, who cares if the thing is over — the outcome predetermined — before halftime.

Early on Sunday night, the Patriots got off to a strong 24-7 lead. By the fourth quarter, it been extended to 31-14, and the game looked, at least from the comfort of my couch, as if they were in the bag. (Eff you, Colts — what’s the Manning face for crap, there goes my undefeated season?) Then it was 31-21, and then 31-28. 4th and 2. Go for it. Turn it over on downs. Bring on the Manning face for hey, thanks for helping out.

And now we’re supposed to believe that the air of infallibility that surrounds the Belichick name has been befouled. Maybe. But frankly we don’t give a fuck. After all, this is entertainment. And though the hooded genius may have received some kind of cosmic comeuppance, or dealt his team a Greek tragedy of a loss, he did so in the process of entertaining me and you. For that, he retains the must-watch title.

At least until he goes back to dealing in blow-outs.

Photo by IYM via Flickr

A week ago, Yanina Wickmayer, the world’s 16th-best female tennis player (according to rankings) was suspended for violating a portion of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) code. To be clear, no one has directly accused Wickmayer — who, at 20, had a breakthrough run in this year’s U.S. Open — of using a performance-enhancing substance. Nope. What’s got officials miffed is the fact that the Belgian phenom broke the agency’s reporting rules, according to ESPN, “three times within an 18-month period.” If you believe Wickmayer, the year-long suspension was the undeserved result of a rules mix-up and a few crossed e-mails and postal wires. If you believe the World Governing Body of Tennis, “[i]t is recognised [sic] and accepted that No Advance Notice Out-of-Competition Testing is at the core of effective Doping Control, and without accurate information as to a player’s whereabouts, such testing can be inefficient and often impossible” — so Wickmayer’s failure in this regard is detrimental to the anti-doping movement. Either way, Wickmayer’s punishment and that of fellow Belgian Xavier Malisse — who was found guilty of the same bureaucratic oversight — came as a surprise, and there has been some speculation that the harsh penalties they received were more directed at a former player than anyone currently touring.

In so doing, the various sporting powers that be have given sports fans another reason to question the purpose of WADA — and, really, why, in the face of such ridiculousness as that which Wickmayer and Malisse have fallen victim to, any of us spectators should care at all about whether or not players in any sport engage in doping.

In the United States, questions about performance-enhancing drugs begin with Lyle Alzado. Alzado was a defensive linemen for the NFL’s Denver Broncos, Cleveland Browns, and — most memorably — the Oakland Raiders. He died at the age of 43 in 1992, after a battle with brain lymphoma, a rare form of cancer that he blamed on his use of anabolic steroids. As ESPN put it, “ Although there is no medical link between steroids and brain lymphoma…[h]e became a symbol of the dangers of steroid abuse.” Eventually, the NFL began testing and suspending players for the use of a host of so-called “banned substances.” The fallout from that program — instituted here for the sake of saving future Alzados, even if the real solution to football’s heath crisis has little to do with anabolics — has lead to multiple four-game suspensions for players who, like Wickmayer and Malisse, don’t necessarily test positive for a performance-enhancing drug (PED). Diuretics, for example — which the NFL considers to be evidence of guilty system flushing — seem to lead to more penalties than PEDs themselves.

Next up was baseball, which — thanks to the efforts of Jose Canseco — eventually found itself before Congress. When it did, the question wasn’t so much who was using but who wasn’t. And, as repeated leaks from a 2003 positive test list seemed to be confirmed by ritualized mea culpa after ritualized mea culpa, it indeed became apparent that — among stars at least — baseball’s collective use of PEDs was rampant. Still, even after all of this reckoning, the lingering effect isn’t one that will ensure a level playing field for future generations. Rather, it is the assumption that the multi-millionaires who benefit from performance enhancement will find ways around whatever testing protocol is instituted, no matter how rigorous it is; an air of suspicion that brings on the sort of Kafka-esque environment where non-PED using athletes find themselves condemned for small bureaucratic infractions — and the real WADA targets get away with their drug use.

Just to be clear: This goes for every sport. Wickmayer, Malisse, and Joselio Hanson of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles have all, in the past week, found themselves suspended for the mere appearance of improper medical enhancement. This, while two weeks ago, two admitted steroid users helped lead their team to baseball’s world championship. Until WADA and the various sports governing bodies that subscribe to its program can figure out a way to evenly, fairly, and responsibly enforce anti-doping rules, there seems to be no reason that any one should trust their rulings. And because science will no doubt provide athletes intent on finding a way to artificially enhance their respective performances a way to do so ahead of whatever testing there is to stop such activity, it seems as though the only folks who’ll get caught up in all of this are (and will be) innocent of any direct PED crime.  Which is to say that maybe, we’d all be better off without any of it.

Photo by Cubbie Nation via Flikr

Fully one-third of your Unfit Times staff considers itself to be of the set that ranks baseball up there with Shakespeare in terms of entertaining drama. And though wholehearted enjoyment of this fact escaped us until relatively recently, over more than a quarter century of baseball watching, we have been treated to plenty in the way of examples of our favorite sports‘ ability to trump the bard in terms of nearly every experiential emotion.

We expect to be treated to par in this regard when Pedro Martinez and Andy Pettitte do battle — ah, battle — this evening in Game 6 of  the 2009 World Series. And though we have no real (read: Red Sox-related) rooting interest in tonight’s proceedings, we are fairly certain that there is nothing better in the whole wide world of sports than watching two skilled veteran hurlers go head to head.

In honor of the event, we’ve decided to finally bring the two highest forms of drama together. Enjoy.

Another part of the field.

Enter MacPettitte.

MACPETTITTE.	[Three days rest I am given.] Why should I [not] play the Roman fool and die On mine own sword? [Ah, but] [w]hiles I see livesPhillies, the gashes Do better upon them.

Enter MacPedro.

MACPEDRO.	Turn, hell hound, turn!
MACPETTITTE.	Of all men else I have avoided thee. But get thee back, my soul is too much charged With blood of thine [teammates] already.
MACPEDRO.	I have no words. My voice is in my swordchangeup, thou bloodier villain Than terms can give thee out! They fight.
MACPETTITTE.	Thou losest labor. As easy mayst thou the intrenchant air With thy keen swordchangeup impress as make me bleed. Let fall thy blade on vulnerable crestsNational League lineups; I bear a charmed life [potent offense, and short right field porch], which must not yield To one of woman bornwho suffers the “who’s your daddy” chant.
MACPEDRO.	Despair thy charmmystique and aura, And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee, Macpedro was from his mother’s wombyour fearful chant Untimely ripp’dreleased.
MACPETTITTE.	Accursed be that tongue that tells me so, For it hath cow’d my better part of manmade me awkwardly jostle my rosin bag! And be these juggling fiendsYankee ghosts no more believed That patter with us in a double sense, That keep the word of promise to our ear And break it to our hope. I’ll not fight with thee.
MACPEDRO.	Then yield thee, coward, And live to be the show and gaze o’ the timeserve up a hanging breaking ball to Ryan Howard. Or perhaps Chase Utley. We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, “Here may you see the tyrantwashed-up mercenary.”
MACPETTITTE.	I will not yield, To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’sHamels’ feet, And to be baited with the rabble’s curse. Though Birnam Woodadvanced age and poor use of the minor league system be come to Dunsinanethe Bronx, And thou opposed, being of no woman bornno fear of the “who’s your daddy” chant, Yet I will try the last. Before my body I throw my warlike shield! Lay on, Macpedro, And damn’d be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”

Exeunt fighting. Alarums.

We here at Unfit will not be so presumptuous as to write the ending for a game that hasn’t happened yet. But, we’ll remind you, readers, that Shakespeare called for MacBethPettitte to be beheaded, and his line to fall.

Photo by Scott Ableman via Flickr

As part of their attempt to make this year’s edition of baseball’s World Series something more interesting than the four-game Yankee coronation it will be, ESPN has decided to break out the ole ‘Team of the Decade’ evergreen and take it for a hack-driven spin. At the wheel is Jayson Stark who, among other key points of over-hyped and downright false interest, insists that the winner of the 2009 MLB crown will help us fans to understand “what this World Series REALLY means” — that if the Phillies can figure out a way to beat those pin-stripped bastards then the Red Sox (full disclosure: my Red Sox) will officially be crowned the team of the oughts. In honor of Stark’s wanton use of self-contradiction (seriously, go back and read this thing; it’s the perfect argument for mandated high school rhetoric classes), and ESPN’s continuing habit of false-quali/quantification, we here at Unfit would like to offer you our own poorly formed look at Baseball History. We call it: The Reason Why the Washington Nationals are the Team of the 2000s.

It All Starts With Poutine

The Unfit sports department has informed us that baseball gurus rely heavily on statistical analysis to provide insight into the game. We feel that this attempt to scientifically understand what is, after all, nothing more than a game, is nothing short of ridiculous. Instead, we’d prefer to rely on something more generally digestible. And what is more generally digestible than food? By food, of course, we mean french fries, and when these tasty, greasy delicacies are covered in cheese curds and gravy, we’d argue that no other brand of food (traditional or Unfit-defined) can come close.

It is our further belief that any sports franchise born in the land of poutine (which is, for you unfamiliar heathens out there, what French Canadians like to call french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy) inherits the spirit that the stuff inspires in its people. Namely that of intestinal fortitude. And since the Nats franchise was born in the land of poutine, its staff (and that means everyone from the lowliest hot dog slinger to the lowliest general manager) must therefore have been infused with the power of poutine (if only by association). That, friends, is the sort of solid foundation one could only hope to build a successful team on.

Jocks Can’t Spell: A Most Solid Proof

Of course, a solid foundation does not a $630 million stadium make. To fully complete the building of a franchise destined to be named the Unfit Franchise of the Decade, an organization must be able to prove its true sports-worthiness. Unfit’s crack research team has determined that the best way to prove true sports-worthiness is to use the ancient measure of 1980s television high school social status, a key dictate of which states that no true jock shall have knowledge of the world. Translation? If your team can spell, you suck. Thankfully, the Washington Nationals can’t spell. And, as such, the franchise goes a long way toward proving its athletic prowess.

Okay, Fine: Scientific Proof

Unfit correspondent Josh Rosenblatt reminds us that baseball is a “game of statistical failure” — and he’s right: As has been pointed out many times, a hitter has only to do his job 3 times out of every ten to be considered a master of his sport. And, as we all know, for there to be a master, there must be WAY more sucky performers (you know, the exception that proves the rule thing). If those WAY more sucky performers are the rule, then are they not what could be considered the personification of the purest form of baseball? So what if a team consisted of nothing but sucky perfomers or, as in the Nats’ case, had a collective performance that was so sucky, it nearly surpassed the suck of every sucky suckitude ever sucked in the whole wide world of suckball? That, friends, would mean that the team had achieved something monumental. To adapt Hindu mythology (via Robert Oppenheimer): They are become baseball perfected.

How’s that for statistical analysis?

The Greatest Gift: Returning the Sport to the Masses

As is evidenced by the booze-swilling, beer-gutted likes of Babe Ruth, baseball was always a reachable sport; something little Joe Sixpack could see his own booze-swilling, beer-gutted self participating in at an exceptional level. At least until Jose Canseco began all a-blubberin about how the sport was infested with drug-enhanced supermen. Now, thanks to all the hormones and abnormally large biceps, little Joe Sixpack is, when he wants to think semi-realistically, reduced to hoping he can one day spark a political tempest. Unless, of course, he’s a fan of the Washington Nationals: In Natstown, anyone can (and probably would) be better than the product on the field.

Which is to say that the Nationals are singlehandedly returning baseball to the masses. A success that neither of the over-rated teams playing in this year’s World Series can lay claim to.

Photo by astorg via Flickr

For those of you who may have missed the New Yorker article that shined a respected national spotlight on it. Or the coverage of the political shenanigans spawned by its faults. Or any of the articles about the increasing mess it seems to be making for current Texas Governor Rick Perry and his bid for a third term.

Okay: So, for those of you who have placed yourselves on something of a domestic U.S. news embargo over the past few weeks, NPR offered a nice summation of the Cameron Todd Willingham case this past Wednesday. Willingham, as most of you will remember, is the guy who was put to death in the nation’s busiest death chamber after years of innocence claims and despite some actual proof, which some argue was of the variety that might have lead to an eventual exoneration. In the wake of all of this, death penalty opponents find themselves in the morbidly awkward sort of position usually reserved for the beatifiers of assassinated heads of state and their subsequently idolized ilk: Robbed of a chance to see the full-realization of their subject’s potential (in Willingham’s case, his theoretical exoneration), they are forced to salvage what they can from death. For anti-death-penalty crusaders, Willingham’s execution might (despite Dahlia Lithwick’s Slate-published assertion that the Constitution offers no comfort for properly convicted innocent death row inmates) be just the sort of test case that they’ve been waiting for — something that could be pointed to in court as evidence that innocent people fall victim to the U.S. death penalty. When they find that case — and if it results in a second nationwide ban on capital punishment — things could get ugly in Texas.

NPR’s John Burnett, the reporter who authored that summation of the Willingham case mentioned above, was spot-on when he called the death penalty “sacrosanct” in the mind of Texans. Here, as Burnett pointed out, “upwards of 70 percent of the population support[s] it” and “[n]o serious candidate from either party runs against it.” There are, of course, the color-coded-state explanations of this fact — that Texas is a state with a decidedly conservative bent, and that in such states, support for the death penalty is stronger than it is elsewhere. But there seems to be further reason that Burnett used a synonym for inviolable when describing this state’s attraction (addiction?) to execution, and these have something more to do with identity than any sort of ideology.

As any politically aware citizen of the United States — and, on two occasions, the world — can tell you, Texans like their elected officials to be of the folksy variety: Lyndon Johnson gave visiting dignitaries tours of his ranch from the backseat of his Lincoln Continental convertible, Ann Richards rode her Harley around Austin, Dubya’s entire public persona was based on what was presented as a simple, black-and-white worldview. Almost every public official sports some kind of cowboy gear, no matter the amount of time that they spend behind a desk. These are all acts of homage — a very public kow-towing to the Gus McCrea/Woodrow Call character-ideal that lives inside of so many Texans — and, in return for them, Great Staters (and, on two occasions, game U.S. citizens) offer-up a whole variety of public offices.

The trouble here is that, as part of their cultivated cowboy image, latter-day Austin-bound Virginians can’t part with the folksy judicial elegance offered by capital punishment. With it, a guilty party is dispatched — granted, not as quickly as some cowboys might otherwise have liked, but dispatched, nonetheless — in ideal fashion; justice wears the white hat we’d like it to, and the bad guy is forced to submit to its will. It’s a simple treatment for the plague of extreme crime, one not adequately addressed by the here-relative complexities of the prison system. It’s not quite kill ‘em all, but it’s close. And as long as the cowboy remains the figure most ideally suited for public office in Texas, it’ll stay that way.

Which is why Willingham — and any future would-be exoner-ite — never had a chance. And it’s why secession is more likely to find its way into the state of Texas’ agenda than a moratorium on (let alone, the outlawing of) executions.

Photo from Saul.Davis via Flickr

Yesterday, while in the process of defending U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) from criticism that he hadn’t brought enough new money into the state, Edwin Merwin Jr. and Jim Ulmer committed a … social faux pas that may cost them their respective roles as officials in the Orangeburg County Republican party. “There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves,” wrote Merwin and Ulmer in the (Orangeburg) Times and Democrat. “By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.” Cue. The. Outrage.

And, before we do our Unfit thing, we’d like to make it clear that we agree with the sentiments of the Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Matthew Brooks, who reminded the New York Times that the picture of the Jewish miser “dates back to the centuries of anti-Jewish persecution in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to own land or conduct any business other than money-lending, which was closed to Christians by Church law.” Still, what sticks in our craw isn’t so much the intent of Merwin and Ulmer’s slur — it’s clear that these doofuses actually felt like they were paying compliments to both the Jewish people and DeMint — but rather what it was that convinced the pair that such phrasing might be a good idea. For this, we are at a loss.

So, to better understand the motivations of Merwin, Ulmer, and other artists of the back-handed compliment, we here at Unfit have decided to, for the moment, play along — to argue that the banking Jew is, yes, a figure born of anti-Semitism and rigid social and political power structures but that, now, in the end-times of a post-holocaust glow, the thing has been reconstructed as a sort of badge of honor. In other words, if we believe the idea that Merwin and Ulmer were really aiming for a positive here, Shylock’s pound of flesh becomes a noble extraction carried out in the name of now-righteous self-interest. This jibes with the anti-federal actions that have found the Republican party — and U.S. conservatives — arguing against (to use an extreme example) government death panels and for limited government. To these folks, the common good needs to take a back seat to the individual goal, self-interest is self-preservation, and Shylock was well within his rights.

Is this how the (now-no-longer-hook-nosed) miser shows up as a model character in a political play? And, more to the point, should we M.O.T.s, perhaps freshly empowered by our money-counting acceptance, be reaching out to reclaim him? If Merwin, who told the Times that he has “always abhorred in the past, and shall continue to do so in the future, anti-Semitism in any form whatsoever” is to be believed (through all that bad grammar) and, as Brooks said, “[they] apparently believed that the image of the Jew as penny-pincher was a praise of Jewish frugality,” it would certainly seem like an affirmative answer to the first question.

But, if we are to believe that Merwin and Ulmer are sincere in their admiration of the Jewish people, and, by a logical political extension, that they think free-spending Democrats could, say, learn a lot through a closer reading of The Merchant of Venice, then we also must believe that Jews everywhere should embrace their inner financial wizard. Or something. The problem, of course, is that the image that Merwin and Ulmer seem to have is nothing more than a weird twist on a historically incomplete vision, and, as such, it makes any reclamation effort, by definition,  kind of impossible.

What do we get from all of this? Well, we’re still kind of confused. But we’re pretty sure that you’ll forgive us if we don’t run out and buy ourselves a ledger, a pair of glasses, and a Brooklyn accent.

Photo of Meghan McCain by Tobyotter via Flickr

Yesterday, Atlantic reporter Mara Gay offered her readers a handful of takes on the state of women in the Republican party. “Pundits are predictably split lines on whether to love or fear Liz Cheney’s new red-blooded, anti-Obama, neoconservative foreign policy group, Keep America Safe,” she wrote. “But they agree that she is part of a vanguard of conservative women who are rising to lead the GOP.” And, from the looks of it, they certainly do. Still, following the Meghan McCain Twitter incident — where the daughter of the former presidential candidate was called, among other things, a slut for her tank-topped, sweatpantsed TwitPic appearance — one has to wonder whether this isn’t something of a mixed blessing: Sure, having its very own roster of nationally recognizable female icons might, at first glance, be a positive, but the length of the leash that’s been afforded to them seems to undermine any would-be positive gains here.

Take a look at Sarah Palin. When unveiled, as part of this past fall’s main political event, she brought to the national Republican party stout dedication to … the sort of ever-smiling, folksy character that most television audiences from the 1950s and ’60s would remember as being the perfect second-tier female figure — it was June Cleaver at the Republican National Convention (complete with a horribly cliched storyline about an over-zealousness for shopping). Whether or not the portrayal was fiction, it was hardly the portrait of a political powerbroker. And it was a window into just how far Republican women have come.

Now comes the nonsense with Meghan McCain. McCain, who, with her Tweeting and her cursing and her MTVing, was doing her level-best to help her party shake its (to co-opt her phrasing) pantsuit-y properisms, was put in her place for it. After posting the image, and receiving a whole bunch of flack, McCain reported that she’d been called a slut. She then wrote, in what seems like a rather measured response to such misogyny, that she was “going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in.” Shortly thereafter she tweeted that she “want[ed] to apologize to anyone that was offended by [her] twitpic,” further declaring that she had “clearly made a huge mistake” and is “sorry 2 those that are offended.” This last statement was, no doubt, the result of a public-reaction calculation, made to minimize any damage that the photo might have caused. But this isn’t the gross part. Nope. The gross part would be the fact that some of her Twitter followers were so threatened by the (very minor, it seems) appearance of sexuality in one of their (assuming here, that most of her Tweeting readership is sympathetic to her political views) emerging leaders, that they all ganged up to shut it down. Chalk up another win for the in-the-kitchen-character-building set.

Whether the likes of Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Liz Cheney will have to face — if they should ever climb into the true national spotlight — such a character reduction remains to be seen. But, with the GOP trending toward allowing for a larger role for women, it would serve them well to refrain from taking away their freedom to be anything but mid-20th-century homemakers.

Photo by uncorneredmarket via Flickr

Air Force crews unleashed eight years ago on the then-Taliban-controlled government of Afghanistan kept with the proud air bombardment-tradition of scrawling colorful taunts on the shells of deliverable military hardware. If, in the time that’s elapsed since those first air strikes, some clever chief has figured out a way to turn the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau into a pithy, bomb-appropriate one-liner, we hear at Unfit have yet to hear about it — and that makes us kind of sad: Fact is, lost in all of the 9/11-revenge rhetoric that spawned the initial popular support for the United States’ first effort against Al Qaeda and its allies (not to mention, about a billion snappy chalk messages), what quickly became the real reason for the country’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan sits, awaiting deeper critical and popular light. (Or at least some kind of shell-side acknowledgment.)

Here’s the thing: Nation-building is, to the U.S. government — and many of their NATO counterparts — a noble pursuit. So, gifted with the military and economic prowess afforded to so many of the western-descended powers,  the argument goes that such might should be spent in the effort to establish democratic institutions. The trouble comes when democracy doesn’t make for a good fit. Then, in the instance that majority rule is ill-fitted for or unwanted by the political entity that it is being visited upon, shit gets ugly. This begs the question: Is it in the best interests of the western powers to try and force a place into voting submission?

General Stanley McChrystal would say it is. On October 1, he spoke to, as the New York Times reported, “an audience of military specialists at London’s Institute for Strategic Studies.” There, he laid out his argument for broad U.S. involvement in Afghanistan based on the concept of stability. According to the Times, he told his audience that “[a] strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a short-sighted strategy.” Here, thanks to his repeated calls for a larger force, and his lobbying against a truncated, counter-terrorism-centered campaign, we can guess that he means for stable to be synonymous with democratic.

The trouble with Afghanistan (among other places) is that NATO-force-backed visions of a unified, democratic nation rising from the ashes of a theocratic dictatorship whose toppling was followed by eight years of war is nothing more than an educated assumption. Which is to say that, just because the United States thinks it knows what’s best for the region — a notion based solely on ideals that just don’t fit in some places — doesn’t necessarily mean that it does. Sure, the western forces currently in Afghanistan have deposed what looked, to their eyes, like an unholy example of  backward ideology forced upon a tortured populace. And, having done so, they’ve managed to install a friendly, nominal (at least) democracy. But the reality is that the thing may not be tenable outside the limits of Kabul (or, indeed, even within the city itself) — and the last legitimate government to have any sort of function, nationwide, was the very one that had been deposed in the name of what McChrystal terms “stability.”

And, as if that weren’t enough, the U.S. and its allies are so invested in the success of this particular project that, when faced with evidence of widespread voter fraud by the executive, Hamid Karzai, who owes his post to their support, it took them almost two months to face that fact. Worse, a high-ranking U.N. diplomat was forced out after he accused his organization of engaging in a cover-up of the mess in order to keep Karzai in power. The western-style Afghani democracy is, apparently, so important that it warrants its own neglect.

Of course, the argument could be made that this latest development is more about securing a friendly nation in the heart of an increasingly unfriendly region than it is about securing democracy for that nation’s people. And this may be true. Still, thanks to the history of the character of the United States’ imperial ambitions, the two things are virtually inseparable. So even if we can’t come up with a nifty, Rousseau-inspired insult to chalk on the side of various rounds of munitions, for better or worse (in this case, most likely, the latter — for all parties) the true force behind our efforts in Afghanistan descends from his ideas: force the people to be free, it would appear, at all costs.