The Women's Edition

As a run-up to Father's Day weekend, here's a platter about women. Well, mostly. Well, sort of, because all of the "women's issues" here result from the entitlement of white men.

• I blame the outrage at the US women continuing to celebrate joy in scoring goals, both individually and as a team on entitled, constipated old white men. A particular group of constipated old white men: The power brokers at FIFA who set up the standings system to encourage teams to grind the bootheel into the wounded. Two things do so: Making "goal difference" the first tie-breaker in standings, and not limiting the goal-difference number attributable to a match. It's bad for competitive balance and bad for the audience, especially any audience of purported neutrals. If the measure was goals scored, there's still an opportunity for joy, and for the superior team to not get grumpy about it, if the inferior team scores on a deflected-ball-turned-into-breakaway-counterattack or a freaky penalty or just an isolated individual moment of brilliance. And if there's a limit of, say, four- or five-goal credit for a particular match, we don't have the problem of running up scores encouraged by evaluation systems that don't include an "enough is enough" component, reminiscent of the oft-criticized computer ranking systems for college football.
• And meanwhile, we're not going to see criticism leveled at the Italian players for their remonstrations to eject a Jamaican player who committed a reckless foul… at a time that the Italians were already up 4–0 and were no doubt worried about a diminution of their own goal difference. That's actually a more-prevalent and more-dangerous "bad sporting behavior" problem than is running up a score in a match that counts. But the Italian women are not Americans, either, so…
• The domestic contrast of Fox's channel-flipping mandate in favor of the domain of rich entitled white men (the US "Open" Golf Championship) in the face of the concerted effort by rich, entitled white men to avoid paying the women who've invaded the clubhouse by being superior is a bit much (and it's not just the US, it's FIFA, too). So f*ck you, Fox Sport programming dorks. Put the whole Women's World Cup on Fox itself — the broadcast channel — especially since (due to the time-zone differences) the Women's World Cup is over by the time the right white guys have recovered from their three-martini lunches, even in New York. Relegate the "spectacle" of golf (and its environmental and class-warfare-by-the-rich arrogance) to where it bloody well belongs: Zero-dark-thirty reruns. It'll still be fresh the next day on VHS recordings.
• There should be two women exiting the Whitesupremacy House staff. One is going, voluntarily; I can only imagine that her next gig will be as Director of Communications for the tobacco industry, because that's the only big-name (and big-compensation) post I can imagine in which outright lying is both more prevalent and more expected. Not even Big Pharma, Big Chem, or Big Energy is as bad. One must wonder, though, why marijuana (with some proven health benefits, although admittedly a lot of minuses) is a Schedule I substance not even being fully researched, and tobacco is not… oh, wait a moment, there were/are a lot of white male entitled (slave-owning and/or obtaining their land and business from slave-owning) registered-voter American farmers growing tobacco. Never mind: If you have inherited expectations of continuing in a line of business, you're entitled to do so no matter how damaging that line of business is to others.

  The other one, however… Unfortunately, a pattern of "mere" knowing and willful violations of the Hatch Act is not felonious. Hell, I bet the appearance fees more than cover the fines, which will probably be paid under the table by Roy Moore's election committee anyway. Notwithstanding the further illegality involved in that: "Manifest destiny," y'all.