Coming to a head.
President Trump seems pathologically opposed to festering problems. When he sees a festering problem, he pops it like a zit. For example, the North Korean nukes problem has festered since the Clinton administration. Trump is bringing Little Rocket Man to a head.
NAFTA has been festering since the Clinton administration. Trump is bringing NAFTA to a head.
The latest example: the NFL anthem-haters.
This anthem-hating is over a year old. The anthem haters divided fans and hurt ratings for NFL last year and this year. Thirty-four percent of former fans who quit watching football blame the anthem haters.
The anthem-hater problem was not going away. It was festering. It was like a big, ugly zit. A third eye. Right in the middle of the NFL’s forehead.
Trump doesn’t like zits. So he popped it.
The NFL’s childish overreaction was predictable. These are, after all, the most brain-damaged people in the world, according to science. Research shows 99 percent of deceased NFL players have serious, debilitating brain damage. Something called CTE.
A new report shows 40 percent of living NFL players have other forms of serious brain damage. NFL players are slower than most men of the same age.
On the tests of thinking skills, about 50 percent [of NFL players] had significant problems on executive function, 45 percent on learning or memory, 42 percent on attention and concentration, and 24 percent on spatial and perceptual function.
One symptom of CTE is the loss of emotional regulation. Football players literally cannot control their emotions. Football players regress to puberty. Perpetual puberty. They hit their wives. They kill themselves. They throw tantrums. They make bad decisions. They’re emotional adolescents.
Unlike normal adolescents, though, there’s no hope for NFL players. Good life coaching won’t help them mature. They won’t outgrow their dysfunction. Over time, they’ll only get crazier.
It’s sad.
Rush Limbaugh loved football. Like me, Rush loved the Pittsburgh Steelers. But Rush’s love for football turned slowly to deep sadness. Sadness for a love that died.
The mystique is gone. That actually started vanishing a while ago. The larger-than-life aspect of it is gone. The belief, the wish, the desire that the people in the game were the best and brightest and special, and that’s why they were there, that’s gone. And it’s been politicized. It has been politicized and corrupted, and it didn’t start this weekend. It started years ago. And if I wanted to, I could go back and get the transcripts from a few years ago on this program where I first sensed that this was happening and was going to happen.
Sad. Sad that so many Americans have lost their love for the game of football. Such an American sports. The gridiron. The tailgate. The tension. The ‘immaculate reception.’ The memories. The memories that football players lose to concussions and brain damage.
Now, football tastes bad. Football tastes like the pus from a zit.
For years, leftists tried to hurt the sport. Leftists hated football’s masculine, all-American image. In the 1990s, leftists tried to “prove” that football fans beat their wives. (Their methods were suspect, at best.)
Having failed to discredit the game, leftists seem to have taken over sports journalism. Like Hollywood, sports journalism blacklists conservatives. ESPN fires broadcasters for deviating from their leftist party line.
ESPN fires broadcasters for expressing their political views. Yet ESPN hollers when President Trump suggests NFL owners fire players who use the game to promote political views.
As Rush Limbaugh said, the politicization of the NFL has festered for decades. But with his words and tweets, President Trump brought the issue to a head. President Trump popped the zit on the NFL’s forehead. And the NFL stands to lose. As Rush Limbaugh said:
But the one thing that this is not going to do… I don’t care what anybody says: The one thing this is not going to do is make the NFL more popular. It is not going to make the NFL more ingrained in our society. You just cannot have a business as large as the National Football League — which is as dependent on public dollars as it is. You simply cannot have a business that allows itself to be used to promote “social justice” when that promotion of social justice requires displays of anti-Americanism, however you want to define it.
There will be a resolution now. Finally, a resolution. A draining. It’s unavoidable. Thanks to President Trump, the festering pimple on the NFL’s face is oozing. It will heal. One way or the other, the issue will soon end.
Thank you, President Trump. Sometimes leadership is as simple as popping a zit.