Kennesaw Mountain Goodell

It's Friday and I have some time to kill before I get to yelling at some people over whom I hold no explicit authority.

So, Goodell sits down Roethlisberger for 6 games after the latter was cleared of criminal wrongdoing for doing whatever it is he needed to do to knock down a 20 year old bird. All views Bokolis has heard from everyone reflects their ideology, that this sumbich did this and that and that Goodell was right to slap a 6 game bid on him.

If we're going to look strictly at this situation, then sure, Ben may have gotten just desserts. However, there is a bigger picture and a bigger issue.

When the MLBPA puts the screws to the owners, everybody blasts the players. The media have portrayed Donald Fehr as a sinister, almost satanic presence, a stain on baseball. When the owners were found guilty of collusion, they were slapped on the wrist; nobody batted an eye. Bokolis isn't saying that there are good guys here, because there aren't.

But, the lesson was always that, if ownership can push around such a powerful union, the rest of us are fucked. I'm sure that, were I to go downstairs and ask 100 (largely) random people on the street whether they were paid their self-perceived worth, I couldn't get 5 of them to say yes.

That is why I always root for the unions and won't bat an eye at the salaries, grossly overpaid though they may be...even if it means the owners are going to raise ticket prices to cover it.

The Roethlisberger case, and those of the other NFL derelicts before him, present an interesting parallel and are setting a dangerous precedent.

After having 4 or 5 drinks at the bar, anyone (we're talking a regular, grown-ass man) that drives home knows that, should some shit go down, they have strict liability. So, if you're going to blow a .12, like Jim Leyritz and Donté Stallworth, if some slob jumps in front of your car, you're on the hook for him. It doesn't matter that whether on foot or in a vehicle, Miamians have this issue with wandering into a traffic lane for no apparent reason (that doesn't just happen in GTA; this is a real phenomenon). It doesn't matter that the woman that caused the accident that killed her was more drunk than you were*, it's your ass.

*- That's not to suggest Leyritz be absolved.

If some shit like this (just the getting pulled over part...God forbid, not mowing down someone) happened to Bokolis, I'd be fucked; likely out of a job, with a future of events that will only drive me to drink. My career in corporate America: D-O-E-N done. I'd have the state telling me how to live my life and I'd probably have to sell my ass for cash.

Just desserts, scumbag, right? Sure, you self-righteous cunts. Like Tony said, you're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie.

I digress. Let's change the scenario to something that everybody does: Drinking on a worknight, 2 or 3 drinks over 90 minutes. That's not illegal. Do we want to raise the ante? Let's say you'd blow a .06 and you drove home afterwards and, like 99.999% of the millions of people who do this, you get home without incident.

A .06 would get you a summons, I think. But, at .06 how tired you are has a far greater effect on your driving ability and judgement than your BAC. It's highly unlikely that you'd do anything to get yourself pulled over.

Let's further suppose that, because you're a moron, you tweeted it. Corporate Big Brother picks up on this and docks you a day's pay because some cunt in HR feels you couldn't possibly have put in an honest day's work. That's some bullshit, right? The lush CEO is stealing money every day.

You want a little more credit than that, don't you? It's 20 years from now. Indians still haven't developed critical thought, so you still have your job. Yet, globalization and the Information Age have taken such hold so that, effectively, you are on call 24 hours per day. Along those lines, Corporate Big Brother has intruded to the point where it can now observe virtually everything you do and has the AI to analyze it. CBB observes that you are out boozing and hunting for poon-tang, which, it deems, limits your ability to absorb and convey information (assume your job doesn't involve the conveyance of information on how to pick up tipsy 20-something birds). Your pay grade is lowered for the rest of the week.

Too creepy? Too fucked up? All right, before leaving the office/signing off, you are now made to file an agenda of your evening plans. This information is conveyed to the establishment you will patronize, you are cut off at the appointed time, dumped in a cab and sent home. Change the options; you can stay longer, but you have to concede a vacation day, or a day's salary.

How about, while on vacation, you engage in similar activities to Roethlisberger; I'll leave it up to your imagination as to whether the girls went willingly and you had a bouncer at your door.

You're not that cool? Fine, you pass out drunk on the beach and your buddies have to drag you back to the room. They do some forgy shit to you, like make you piss yourself or draw on cocks on you with a marker or, worse yet, draw directly on your nutsac.

Not that Bokolis would know; I can hold my liquor.

The public figure, role model angle is bullshit. We're now blue-skying an employer sanctioning for perceived transgressions in personal lives in the face of signed contract- never mind that it is non-guaranteed and contains imposed morals clauses that give the employer the right to terminate...just so we can feel- WTF do you care?- that justice has been served. The rest of us don't even have that protection, but it's only a matter of time until these rules are applied to us.

Yeah, yeah, asshole. The boss doesn't even sanction for the shit we do on company time. We'll let go that you're cheating yourselves by fucking off at work. Does it make you feel better to think that you're only a hyper-diligent IT guy away, or that your company writes off a certain amount of it as an inevitability?

I'm not that smart and not all that creative. If I can think of this, you can be sure that, before too long, someone with the drive to implement worse will come along.

That's all the fuck I got.