Last Tuesday saw something quite unusual on the Guardian website; in fact, it has been nigh on unheard of for over six months now. For the first time that I can recall when going to the webpage dealing with the paper’s UK headlines, to my utter amazement there were no articles about Jeremy Corbyn. Surely this couldn’t be, I thought. For those of you not au fait with UK politics, this is almost akin to ISIS deciding to promote pacifism and a secular state. Not a day has gone by since JC’s election to the head of the British Labour Party that there hasn’t been a story or an opinion piece criticising him for being too much to the left, too much to the right, too hardline, too soft, too stubborn or too spineless (though given the sheer number of knives that have been stuck in his back by his own party, he can probably be forgiven for that last one). Now I know that the guy strikes some as a beardo-weirdo and his opinions and proposed policies are very much to the left of the political spectrum, but that really doesn’t warrant the volume of vitriol that’s been sent his direction by his own party and the mainstream media. I’m certainly not advocating giving the man a free-pass but I think a balance needs to be struck between coverage of the leader of the opposition and whaling on the nutter in the tweed jacket.
Speaking of nutters, we had yet another fantastic quote from Donald Trump last week when he complained that the NFL had become soft which is a metaphor for the US itself becoming soft. I believe his complaint concerns the changing of the laws in the NFL to penalise head-on collisions and hence reduce the potential long-term brain injuries that these can cause. Now to a relatively sane person, this seems like a reasonable proposition given that research on the brains of 165 (dead) people who had played football at high school, college, or professional level found that 131 (79%) of them showed signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative disease caused due to repeated concussive events. Furthermore, of the original 165, 91 were former NFL players and 87 (97%) of those showed evidence of CTE. You could argue that the results would be skewed as the people most likely to donate their brains to science would be the ones that suspected themselves of having CTE but even so…97%??? Donald may argue that no head-on collisions makes the NFL weak but I’d argue that a settlement between the NFL and retired players made in September 2015 which could potentially see $1bn in compensation payments by the NFL over the next 65 years is probably going to weaken it far more. There’s one thing that isn’t a bit soft in the NFL, according to Donald, and that’s Tom Brady though it may be a different case for his balls *ahem*
Legal disclaimer: yes, I realise that Tom Brady’s suspension for using under-inflated balls was thrown out by the US federal court following a protracted legal dispute but….meh
Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong though. Maybe Donald needs people to be soft in the head because I honestly don’t see otherwise how so many US republicans can see this demagogue as a credible future.president. You can argue that he says what he believes and that’s great….however his beliefs seems to be propagating xenophobic and sectarian stereotypes to appeal to the lowest common denominator which isn’t (Personally, I think this line of reasoning is the same as the one for G W Bush which went that he was the kind of guy you could sit down and have a beer with – I know plenty of people I can sit down and have a beer with but I would trust none of them to run a country on that basis alone). indeed, it was during a recent drunken stagger home that I started trying to come up with alternate lyrics to Danny Boy for Donald and though the result is fairly dismal, I’m still going to stick it in below:
Oh Donny boy, your rhetoric’s appalling,
Your far right stance, sends shivers down my spine,
Your racsim appears to know no boundaries,
Your sexist views, are from another time
But yet you still are top amongst the GOP,
Despite the slurs, the taunts and bigotry,
But it’s your hair, that is the thing that worries me,
Because it’s what controls your mind, I do believe.