Not that I give a shit about...

...baseball or whether or not players use steroids (I'd have no problem with stock, fuel and super-modified teams and sports) but I don't know if I can find the words to adequately understand how revolted it makes me to read an article like Mike Celizik's Clemens should have just said yes (NBC Sports/MSNBC).

Celizik's point is that--guilty or not--Rogers Clemens should have just admitted to Congress he used performance enhancing drugs. MSNBC wrapped the article this way:

Roger Clemens would be a lot better off right now if he would have acknowledged use of performance-enhancing drugs — whether he used them or not — instead of being defiant, writes NBCSports.com contributor Mike Celizic.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Celizik writes:

We’ve reached the point where everyone in baseball is presumed guilty when in actuality no more than 50 or 60 percent — OK, 70 percent tops — of the guys who played before 2004 actually dabbled in performance-enhancers.

Under such circumstances, the only thing a player accused of taking a shot or a pill or a salve is to admit it, whether he actually did it or not. It doesn’t matter if he never ingested anything stronger than distilled water and can prove it. If the accusation comes, he can save himself a world of grief — and maybe his job and future Hall of Fame chances — by just saying yes.

In other words, confess...like the victims of the Gulag, the Gestapo, the Inquisition--you know the list--just confess and move on; the lumpen will love you for it.

But please, for a moment, consider a couple of things:

1. What business is it of the freakin' guvvermint whether or not a baseball player pumped up on whateverthehell? Really. It's a proper concern only to the folks who buy and sell baseball. Everybody else gets an opinion at most and can otherwise properly just piss off.

It's. A. Game.

Nothing more and nothing else. Except, of course, it's also the government pissing away even more money on bureaucratic make-work--and "holier-than-thou" drug-war bullshit make-work at that.

2. What the hell does "defiant" have to do with anything? If Clemens is telling the truth, he ought to be defiant. Anyways, in the article, when Celizik writes:

That doesn’t wash with the public. We’ll accept many flaws in our heroes, but they can’t be washed down with truculence. Give us some remorse, give us an admission of “bad judgment,” grovel a little and we’ll forgive just about anything, including things you may not even have done. Forget what Nancy Reagan said a generation ago. In matters like these, just say yes.

he's just noting that pride, like moral certainty, is kinda outta style these days.