People are largely out raged about what used to be a scandal about dog fighting and is rapidly becoming a scandal about dog torture and dog killing. Three - seven witnesses have made statements or cooperated with federal prosecutors to finger Michael Vick, Atlanta’s soon to be former Quarterback as the ring leader of illegal gambling, and trafficker in canine cruelty and dog fighting interstate commerce. People are outraged because dogs are supposed to be man’s best friend and anyone that can torture or kill man’s best friend must not be too far from doing the same thing to an actual man or woman.
Take a look at these boxer pictures. Take a look at these Bull Terriers. Take a look at these Mastiffs or these Saint Bernards.
Any of these dogs could be ‘fighting’ dogs but it takes training by people to make them fight and especially to fight to the death.
Take a look at your neighbor, your family members, your teachers, your students, your fellow citizens. Any of those people could become soldiers or even guards in a prison, but it takes training and controls and situations to turn people in to tortures devoid of their humanity or their own ability to stand up against corrupt leaders or groups. These are simple but very hard lessons that the world learned in World War II and proved out with science, psychology and sociology in the decades following the war.
In the early days of the Michael Vick Scandal, I posited the concept that even if Michael Vick never touched a dog, gambled money directly, or managed the operations of the dog fights, that he would still be responsible for what took place on his watch, on his property, with his money.
The concept is the same with the Bush administration. President Bush is responsible for the torture of prisoners, the leaking of a CIA agents cover, for failing to either find weapons of mass destruction or secure them or gather up intelligence to show that they did not exist. He’s responsible for going to war with Iraq when the country was not prepared to hold the country once it was seized. He was responsible for not going to war with enough troops to win the peace and responsible for failing to bring the rest of the world along for the ride.
Both Michael Vick and President Bush are in serious serious trouble however not just because they abdicated responsibility, but because they were involved apparently. They are both innocent until proven guilty from a legal sense but in the court of public opinion they are both guilty. Our standard for choosing a President should not be so low that we choose a President based on their lack of a felony conviction just as our choice of sports heroes should not be based on a bar set so low as to say, “well at least he didn’t kill an actual person as opposed to puppies and dogs.”
They are in trouble, because the bar and our expectation level for a President and a sports hero are set high. Just because a President is human (as every President has demonstrated) it doesn’t mean that we should lower our expectations and forgive bad leadership, bad judgement, lies, corruption or anything else. A sports hero receives a lot of pressure to perform in the moment, but they are also compensated very very well these days. A sports hero is almost a slave to the machine that is the sports industry, but they willingly buy into that machine and take it for all the money that they can. Sports lost their purity of essence a long time ago, but that doesn’t mean that we have to accept puppy killers as our idols on any given Sunday.
America, it is perfectly OK to demand and expect a competent President, a smart President, a well spoken President, a President that will tell the truth and the whole truth at that without parsing the word “is” or sneering behind condescension and bald faced lies.
America, it is perfectly OK to demand and expect our sports heroes to live up to a minimum moral standard that does not include torturing and killing any of the creatures of the Earth, not even each other.
Sports heroes and Presidents receive a great deal of latitude and privilege in our society that is derived from their financial power, political power, and bully pulpit in the spot light of the press. If they do not live up to our ideals, it is perfectly acceptable to pull the bully pulpit out from under them and impeach or suspend them from their jobs, their positions and their rolls. We put them up on the pedestal and we can knock them off the pedestal. No one is above the law, no one is beyond the reach of the Geneva Convention, no one is elected or nominated or even earns their way to a position that allows them to torture someone without facing the consequences. Just because they have the power to do it, does not mean that we have to forgive, forget, or let them off the hook.
I say Sack Vick from the NFL permanently and let the Justice Department do their best in court.
I say Impeach President Bush and Impeach Vice President Dick Cheney from the Oval office and again let the Justice Department do their best in court.
All three men have let us down. All three men have touched something and made the world a nastier place (in GW’s words a more evil place). There are other nasty and possibly evil people all around the world, but we have three of them right here in our own backyard and its time for us to clean up our own house before we finish policing up the rest of the world.
