This is all just too enjoyable. Revenge is not only sweet, it’s positively intoxicating. I have lived to see the two most pompous and arrogant organizations in my lifetime get their comeuppance. The two organizations are the Eagles and the Bush Administration, in case you hadn’t guessed. And things can’t get much worse for either of them.
You can accuse me of bias, but I don’t think that’s the right word. Bias means prejudging and all of my complaints against the regimes of Jeffrey Lurie and George W. Bush are based on judging their actions, not prejudging them.
First by way of explanation, I do freely admit to putting the Italian whammy on both the Eagles organization and the radio station that broadcasts their games. I’m not sure which it was that decided to dump me after hosting the Eagles pre and post game shows for 12 years. Both blame the other. All I know is after putting the whammy on them, the team suffered a miserable 6-10 season and the radio station-WYSP-lost Howard Stern and untold advertising revenues.
So the whammy is alive and well. As far as the Bush Administration, I can’t claim credit for their implosion. The President and his men have done it all themselves.
The Eagles and the Bush Administration both bear a striking resemblance in their wielding of power. Although in fairness to the Eagles, at least their bad year was preceded by some good ones. Bush is still searching for some modicum of success other than being able to get elected with the help of the Supreme Court and then re-elected with apparent voter fraud in Ohio.
Both organizations have an inflated view of themselves. Lurie thought the Eagles were the gold standard in the National Football League, but it turned out to be fool’s gold. Bush reportedly hung up on his father’s call because he suggested that Junior start listening to some moderates instead of the neo-kooks who thought the Middle East was ripe for another Crusade. Both Lurie and Bush are men who were born on third base and think they hit the proverbial triple. Both play to an image of what they are not.
Lurie likes to pretend he’s this touchy-feely liberal with a hip, feminist wife. He complained about the ESPN series "Players" because it glorified drugs and sex among the NFL athletes, but then turned his cheerleaders into soft porn starlets with the help of his wife and Vera Wang, who designed the cheerleaders’ outfits. Hey, he makes a buck off the calendars!
The only time this fuzzy liberal got angry was when Terrell Owens had the temerity to ask for more money and he drew a very public line in the sand that helped destroy the Eagles season. His man, Joe Banner, could play the Grinch; only the Grinch has more personality. His coach, Andy Reid, treats the loyal fans of his city with the back of his hand, saying nothing at his embarrassing media conferences and refusing to take live calls from fans during his canned radio coach show. He had trees planted to block the view of fans trying to watch his team practice at the NovaCare Center, although their tax dollars helped pay for the land the facility is built upon.
Once public tax dollars helped Lurie build his dream stadium, he instituted exorbitant personal seat license charges as his thank you to the fans, skimped on water fountains and tried to use some phony security reason for denying them the right to bring food into the stadium.
Like Lurie uses Banner as his bad guy to deflect criticism from himself, Bush uses Dick Cheney. Bush came to the presidency with as skimpy a résumé as Lurie brought to ownership of the Eagles. Lurie’s claim to fame is he inherited the family money and became a mediocre film producer. Bush, likewise the recipient of family money and a free ticket into Yale, became a faux cowboy and the mediocre owner of a mediocre baseball franchise-the Texas Rangers.
He used the family name to become governor of Texas, a job that has only slightly more power than being the Queen of England. Yet as President, he has expanded his power to rewrite the definition of torture and to wiretap whomever his National Security Agency deems fit without a warrant. Since the "war on terror" has no territorial limits or boundaries of time, Bush has, in essence, created an imperial presidency without end.
With his Republican leadership and some members of his Administration either under indictment or under the threat of imminent indictment, and his misdirected war draining the treasury while he continues to push for tax cuts for fat cats and friends, Bush’s poll numbers have sagged like the enhanced bosom of some faded stripper. Now we all get to watch and listen while Jack Abramoff exposes all the pigs that have been feeding at the trough of lobbyists, and when he’s done, they’ll need a magnifying glass to read Bush’s poll numbers.
Jerks like Terrell Owens and Jack Abramoff are serving a useful purpose, like teaching humility to the arrogant. It doesn’t get any better than this.
