Cheaters

These are Dark Days in the Shining Cities of Bush America. Lights go out early; and the good people shutter their windows, pull down their blinds and keep a watch for shadows, flickering in fire and black on blacker walls, and pray that They Do Not Stop.

You don�t want them to stop.

They stopped at the door of Major League Baseball, because the sport defiled the notion of conservative Christian fair play even though voters in Florida and polling stations in Ohio testified to a far more heinous crime against the American people.

Cheaters. They are all cheaters up on the Hill, and always have been. Few men cut from the cloth of fair play and dignity make it to these thin halls; most understand the Club Difference: Cheating is okay up to the point where it becomes ugly, and public. The Black Sox scandal was ugly, public and Joe Jackson paid the price. Pete Rose bet on baseball for years � but when the bets came due and the people holding the slips were not in a mood for privacy, then poor Pete had to go. Steroids in baseball were tolerated, nae, celebrated in the nineties, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa revived the sport in the Middle of America. The script was perfect: Sammy was the happy little brown man who made everyone laugh and gave us tingles with his story of thanksgiving, and Big Mac was cut right out the Babe, a conquering White Male, a Giant of a Man � and the kind of guy you really could have a beer with.

No one drinks with Barry.

For the past five years, Bonds has been making a mockery of the game, enough so that they were growing restless, and the plausibility of it all began to stretch out of shape. Then it got good and ugly � and really public — with Jose Canseco�s book, and the Crawford Ranch Riot Boys called a meeting.

Cheaters.

Sosa, hiding behind his language and his lawyer, squeaked out a denial that no sane man will ever believe. McGwire did not, and became the wounded deer in this new blood sport game of Congress. Poor Big Mac. He will forever be ruined by the memory of his day in front of the Boys. For him, the image of Canseco poised over his exposed buttocks, syringe at the ready, was just too much for a good Christian Republican to take. That sort of public outing doesn�t happen to a Hero, it doesn�t happen to a man cut like the Babe.

During this dark time of Christian witch hunts in the name of God and Decency, it just doesn�t happen at all.