Leave Roger Alone

Here's the deal:

I'm as disillusioned as the next person when it comes to baseball's Steroid Era. The idea of some of my favorite players using steroids and HGH to boost their game and stats is upsetting, etc etc etc. But this is something that Major League Baseball needs to deal with. Let the commissioner and players union agree to some drug testing policy for the future, and let the fans deliver the punishment for infractions of the past. Keep it internal and everything should solve itself.

The one body that didn't need to stick its nose in as it did was Congress. As I've said before, it's one thing for our legislators to carry out the will of the people and look into this problem as an outside party. But it's totally different when they abuse this power to rip apart ballplayers for fun. That is completely outside their jurisdiction and is entirely unprofessional.

And that brings us to today. Representatives Henry Waxman and Tom Davis, Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, requested that the Department of Justice investigate into if Roger Clemens committed perjury during his recent grilling. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. U.S. Department of Justice. Baseball. One of these things just doesn't belong...

Yes, I know that lying under oath is a federal offense. But it shouldn't have ever gotten that far to begin with. So Senator Mitchell says that a number of players used PEDs during their time in the majors. Great. Congress, if it wanted to get involved, should have talked to Bud Selig about how to handle this problem in the future and should have left it at that. Instead, they selectively picked Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens as victims of their wrath, and then they purposefully put Roger into a situation in which they could cry "perjury!" and get higher levels of government involved. What a waste of time and resources.

(House Oversight Committee, you say? Aren't they more important things they should be overseeing? Such as Bush and Cheney's lies to the American people? Give me a break...)

I'll take this moment to deflect accusations of hypocrisy. I admit that when Barry Bonds was going through a similar circus, I was rooting for the government. But in my defense, it was fueled by my desire to prevent him from breaking the HR record. If I put that bias aside, I can honestly say that what he went through was equally as useless and disgusting. Congress should not be playing the role of a supreme moral judge.

The Fall from Grace of Roger Clemens is now complete. It could have stopped with the Mitchell Report, but our extraordinarily efficient government chose to exploit this opportunity as much as possible. Did I say "Fall"? My mistake. This has been more like a BASE jump from Everest and landing in a 100-ft deep ditch. What a sad state of affairs.